


A Pouch of Pebbles

by loquaciousquark



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Prompt Fic, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2016-11-24
Packaged: 2017-12-07 02:41:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 49
Words: 91,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/743244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loquaciousquark/pseuds/loquaciousquark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><a href="http://loquaciousquark.tumblr.com/post/42108662851/drabbles-send-me-characters-and-a-prompt">Prompt fics</a> from Tumblr, mostly featuring F!Hawke/Fenris. Sometimes it is the little moments between people that turn out to be the important ones. </p><p>Includes Blank Me, Kiss, and Alternate Universe memes, as well as miscellaneous short fills.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Offer Me (Merrill, Hawke/Fenris)

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Очередная душа на продажу](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2538824) by [Tykki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tykki/pseuds/Tykki)



[tarysande](http://tarysande.tumblr.com) asked: Mmm. Merrill and Fenris, Offer Me?

**—**

**Characters/Pairing:** Merrill, Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1,000 (drabble’s a guideline, right?)  
 **Prompt:** Offer Me: one character gives another a gift.  
 **Summary:** Merrill sees more than people think.

—

This is what Merrill sees:

A focused gaze that lingers too long; the sudden, startling curve of a smile before it is swiftly killed; a hand marked front and back with white vines that clenches into a fist of both impotence and longing when no one is looking but Merrill. But she isn’t much of anyone anymore either, she supposes, so perhaps it doesn’t really matter.

Merrill sees, too, the stiff lines of awkward tension that splint together their broken conversations. They neither of them take hurt well, Merrill has found, especially when it’s the soul that’s cut, but Hawke’s determined cheer is very daunting and Fenris has never been tolerant of sympathy, so instead she laces her fingers together in her lap and shores up their fragile peacework when she can, without them noticing, without speaking of scars.

—

This is what Merrill hears:

Anders’s ungentle words, prodding with the sure fingers of a healer at a bruise too fresh for touch; the shift of armor and leather as two people put a distance between themselves; the quiet joy in Aveline’s voice as she pledges herself to Donnic, and the hush of an unmet hope from the place where Hawke stands beside her.

Fenris wears silence like armor. But Merrill knows better than him the way a wounded thing crouches and flinches and makes itself small and quiet before the hunter; and the greater way a forest settles into deep stillness in the hour before opening itself to dawn. Fenris straightens his back and sets his jaw; Merrill hears the thump of blunted claws as a lean wolf whines for the warmth of a fire he desperately fears.

Merrill has lost her pack, too. Sometimes she walks with him where he follows, quietly, not because he wants her there but because she knows what he doesn’t, that it is best sometimes to be beside someone and not behind them, that to be lonely does not mean you must always be alone.

—

This is what Merrill does:

Lets Isabela wonder about what went wrong; lets Varric wish he’d heard the story; lets Hawke’s dog put his great slobbery head on her knee and look up at her, knowing, a secret between the two of them like a promise. They match well here, elf and hound, because if they do not always understand the jokes they both know truth when they see it, even if the truth is hard, and they know too that not all secrets must be beaten and bruised and dragged out into the light before they are ready.

And one night, when Hawke comes to visit and has a good deal too much elvhen sweet wine, Merrill lets herself be calm and open as a pool hidden between the roots of a great oak tree, listening, learning, absorbing truth and hurt alike as it spills out between Hawke’s fingers. She waits for Hawke to finish even though she knows the way this tale goes already, because sometimes too the act of speaking is as much a lance as a salve, and then she kneels down and takes Hawke’s hands in her own, and she tells a little tale of her own.

It’s not much, not really, but it’s one of her favorites and true besides, about a stoneworker who lives at the edges of camp and makes the faces of the Creators and the Forgotten Ones in ironbark and jet. One day he finds his work disarranged, the Dread Wolf brought full into the circle of the others; he moves him away when he is finished with the day’s work, and the next morning he finds again Fen’Harel standing in the circle. That night he asks his little daughter what she has seen, and his daughter tells him that she herself had been the one to put the Dread Wolf with his brothers again.

He asks her why she has done this, and in the easy confidence of a child she tells him, “Because when you are alone so long, sometimes you forget how to make your way back home.”

Hawke stares at her when she has finished, as if Merrill herself has become one of the creatures of her stories, but when she tries to pull away and stand Hawke hugs her instead. “Thank you,” Hawke says into her ear, smelling of sweet wine, as if Merrill has given something of worth to her friend. Then Hawke stands and laughs a little, more freely, and strides out the door with a wave and just the barest hint of a wobble, and Merrill leans against the table and sighs.

Three years, she thinks, is a very long time.

—

So in the end, then, what Merrill gives is what she keeps: Hawke’s secrets, and Fenris’s secrets, and the truths that hide between them both like rock ivy rooting deep and strong before it bursts at last into the light. _That_ is what she has always been meant for, after all, Keeper in training and in spirit, whether or not Marethari wishes it.

These things are hers to remember, and to understand.

And when at last one day she sees Fenris step a little closer than three years’ habit has allowed, she is not surprised at all to see Hawke look over and smile, openly, without hurt. And when she hears Isabela laugh and Varric go digging for his pen, Merrill permits herself a little smile of her own because _she_ knew how this would end, because there is no story to tell that does not have an ending.

—

One day, Fenris falls into step beside her. He cannot quite meet her eyes, because even wolves who are not so dreadful are proud, but he says, “Hawke told me,” and, “I am grateful,” and, at last, “Merrill.”

And as he strides forward again to his place beside Hawke, Merrill links her hands together and lifts them above her face, looking up, smiling, into the sun.


	2. Haunt Me (F!Hawke/Fenris)

[w0rdinista](http://w0rdinista.tumblr.com) asked: F!Hawke, Fenris: Haunt me.

— **  
**

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1,500 (if I can’t write a drabble, I’m going to at least do round numbers, darn it!)  
 **Prompt:** Haunt Me: one character watches over another.  
 **Summary:** Everywhere Fenris goes, he carries his past with him.

**Notes:** This kind of ended up in the same space as Offer Me, but I promise it’s unintentional. Happier stuff is just around the corner, I’m almost entirely certain. :D

 

—

 

Oh, oh, little slave, little wolf, sweet swift-running heart-stealer, what are you doing? You look with those wanting eyes, those guarded and cold and hungry eyes, and you let yourself grow bold. _You_ know what you are; you know where you belong. You know that despite your yearning reach, your hands have only ever closed around black-feathered death.

You are only a slave. What are you doing?

—

Fenris does not sleep often. He has many reasons to give Hawke when she asks, easy things to explain given his history and her own, her demons, his ghosts. It is simple to overpower an escaped slave who is asleep, he tells her; the lyrium in his skin gives him stamina and strength greater than many men; Danarius disliked laziness and took care to discourage it in his household.

All of these things are true, and Hawke accepts them, but none of them is the truth.

Fenris does not sleep often because when he sleeps, he dreams.

It is not the faces that disquiet him, though something thickens in his throat at the glimpses of a girl with red hair turning to glance over her shoulder, of an older woman beside her, tall, elf-eared, both smiling and sad as they look for him and are swallowed by darkness. Neither is it the memories as bright as life of Danarius, laughing, his fine-boned fingers drawing over his cheek, his shoulder, the dip at the small of his back where there is no lyrium. _That_ shame-hot impotence he has known since the first days of his waking life; _that_ deep-rooted terror he keeps in his given name.

No, what wakes him cold and sweating in the dark hours of the morning when the Fade is thick and not even the moon gives light—is the voice. It speaks quietly, and with hard, bitter truths, telling him what he knows already, reminding him when he is stripped of all defenses what is left of him beneath the armor, beneath the lyrium, beneath the careful walls he has built over seven years of flight.

It is no demon’s voice. It is his own.

—

Where is your place, nameless thing? Look at you, crouching in your master’s home, shielded by your master’s armor, clutching to your empty heart the sword your master gave you. What do you know of freedom?

You have so many pretty words, stray-running wolf, if no tongue to speak them with. Your master taught you to flatter him; court her the same way, quick, before she takes in hand the lead that still dangles from your muted throat.

And she will, if she can. You know it.

—

He cannot sleep, so instead when night falls Fenris takes up his sword and steals out into the Hightown streets, a ghost in the dark. There is work there for a wolf, even one on a heavy chain, and death too, and between those things there are moments when he feels near enough to free that he almost forgets the weight of his shackles.

And when Hawke joins him on those nights, quiet and smiling and demanding nothing but his company, he forgets to guard against his dreams. Street by street they take the city, and lane by dim-lit lane, each road opening ahead of them like a promise, unspoken, unfolded to sudden swift-glancing hope. _She_ hopes, he knows; he can read with the eyes of a slave every fleeting word in his master’s face. But he has hopes too, and dreams, and when one night he stumbles blind into her home with death and hatred cupped in his hands she makes it a simple thing to let them go at last.

But sleep does not bring him the peace it brings her, and as the Veil flutters around him like a wind-caught shroud and the hole of his memory flickers with the bright broken-glass shards of a thing that was once whole, Fenris remembers that there is a ghost at his back and a hand around his throat. It tightens to squeezing when she wakes, when she looks at him with—hope, but white-knuckled fists do not make the voice less true when it whispers: _slave, unworthy dog, beg and kneel and run—run—_ run!

—

There, wolf! Even when you wish to you cannot sheath your claws; even muzzled you snap at gentleness. There are shackles on your wrists heavier than any struck from steel, you spineless slave, and iron chains built by your own two hands that bind you fast as a whip’s tail. You deserve no touch that is not a blow.

Close up your heart. There is nothing but weakness there, no softness but the putrid rot that sickens and poisons all who touch it. Shore up your walls, you heartless thing, you hate-choked death-giver. Protect her. Protect yourself.

You deserve _nothing_ of freedom.

—

So Fenris runs, even if he does not leave, and as the years roll over the city he pretends that distance is enough, that denial is enough, that he does not lie in his stolen bed at night, sleepless, dreaming with his eyes open of those things a slave has no right to touch. He has eaten once at the master’s table; let that be enough, a memory to wash smooth the rough edges of the rest, an ember to warm his fingers against the time when Hawke will reach for another more suited to stand beside her. He knows the place he has given himself, wolf bound to her heel—and he knows too the bitterer truth that if she holds his lead it is only because he placed it in her hand.

But Hawke does not turn elsewhere, and she does not call him to stay; instead she looks at the red-cloth shackle he has made for himself as if it is a hopeful thing, as if what it means to him—means something to her.

And when one morning he steps from his uneasy dreams into a waking nightmare more horrifying for being _real_ , Hawke is the one to teach him that not all ghosts are beyond the blade, that just because an evil thing is strong does not mean it cannot be slain. He opens his mouth and the noose around his neck unknots; he says _you are no longer my master_ and though there is another layer behind his words, another master left in place, it is his own breath he speaks with, his own voice, his own heart.

That is what he gives Hawke, later, when she comes to him in the house she thinks of as his, to the hearth she thinks of as his. It is only a slave’s heart, a little thing that she owns already, soft with the deep black rot of constant fear, but despite its faults it is all that he can offer, and when she takes it in her hands like a precious thing he hears the distant clear ring of a shackle breaking open, of a length of chain slipping free to fall on shining stone.

She pries it open, looks in fearlessly. No rot, she says, touching his cheek, no poison. Only bruises.

—

_Little slave, little wolf. What are you doing?_

—

The voice is quiet that night, soft and hissing like fired tongs thrust into still water, but for the first time in the unsteady mire of his memory there is no strength to it, no conviction, no more solidity than any of the shades he has hunted and killed with the woman who sleeps beside him. No truth either, not in the way it whispered to him once, with hard words that chased him to peace and from it again as if he were the only one with a heart that ached, the only one with a shadow haunting his steps.

But there is no master so cruel he cannot be killed. Fenris knows this now.

Slave, ghost, shade of what has been—he banishes them all, these tattered shreds of a life he no longer lives. Those chains have been broken; _those_ memories he has no need to keep so close in his fists, not now, not when there is hope and truth and new memories to be made that carry no fear in their making. His choice he keeps wrapped around his wrist; his heart is bound with it.

“Fenris,” Hawke murmurs, smiling, and he knows his name for his own.

—

No turning back, heart-stealing wolf, not anymore. You’ve broken hers; now you must mend it, no matter the trembling in your slave’s soul, in your slave’s hands.

You’ve closed the path behind you. Look up. Look forward.

_Yes_ , he thinks, and he closes his eyes, listening to Hawke breathe softly against his neck where there is no chain, no collar, no lead. Just because he is hers does not mean he is not also his own.

—

Fenris sleeps, fearing no dreams.


	3. Tell Me (Fenris, Donnic, Hawke/Fenris)

[apocalisse](http://apocalisse.tumblr.com) asked: Let’s see… Donnic and Fenris, “Tell Me”

—

 **Characters/Pairing:** Fenris + Donnic, background f!Hawke/Fenris  & Donnic/Aveline  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1,200   
 **Prompt:** Tell Me: one character confesses something to another.  
 **Summary:** Two friends play cards.

 

—

 

“Two.”

“Hmm. Perhaps you should reconsider.”

“You, serah, are only saying that because you’ve won the last three hands. Two cards, if you please, and less insubordination in the ranks.”

“Your wife has been quite an influence,” Fenris said, nearly certain that was what he meant, and slid two cards from his well-worn deck across the table. They were backed with leering purple harlequins, and he wondered absently if Isabela had given him the pattern on purpose. There was a mostly-empty jug of undefinable alcohol at Donnic’s elbow and a pair of wholly-empty glasses upturned beside it; they threw back the cards’ reflections from their curves, turning two harlequins to eight, and when they abruptly vanished from the little stained-glass world Fenris blinked before realizing Donnic had plucked them from the table.

Donnic arranged the cards in his hand. Peered at them. Moved one of them two places to the left. Peered again.

“Your call,” Fenris said.

“No, yours. I raised you, remember?”

Fenris lifted an eyebrow, looked at his cards, folded them into a neat stack between his fingers. “Call, then,” he said at last, not even minding that he couldn’t remember if Donnic was correct or not. His hand was a winning one in three of the games they were accustomed to wagering over, and Fenris was reasonably sure they were playing diamondback. “Knights over Serpents.”

“Damn,” Donnic said, and tossed the lot of his cards to the table.

Fenris smirked, arranging the fan of colorful cards a bit more neatly over the scarred, pockmarked wood, then leaned back and crossed his arms. “An even four,” he said. “Soon I will know even the names of your childhood friends.”

“Only because Aveline made me promise to stop taking your coin,” Donnic grumbled.

“Your memory is different from mine.”

“Like sweets from a child, she said. It’s cruel to the poor fellow, she said.”

Fenris snorted. “She said nothing of the kind. And you’re stalling.”

“Damn,” Donnic said again, and scratched the thickening stubble on his jaw. “Oh! All right. I have a birthmark on my left foot shaped like a falcon.”

“You do not.”

“In flight,” he stated, and at Fenris’s skepticism was apparently struck with the inspiration—alcoholic or otherwise—to bend under the table and fumble with both hands at his ankle.

“Oh,” Fenris said, when the meaning of the motion filtered at last through his pleasant drunkenness; a moment later he added, “no,” as if it made a difference. Donnic ignored both words, articulate as they were, and as his boot at last came free he leaned back in his chair, rolled his pants sloppily to the knee, and dropped his bare heel upon the table with a thump that rattled the empty glasses.

“A falcon.” He bent his toes, straightened them again. “In flight. Flying.”

Fenris did not, he decided, have much right to complain on the grounds of cleanliness—certainly not here, in this infrequently-used room set off his main hall, where the fire was warm and bright enough to illuminate almost every piece of long-broken furniture—and after a moment he forgot his unvoiced protest in favor of the blurry bird on the back of Donnic’s left foot. His toes had a fine dusting of dark hair across their backs, and Fenris found himself both fascinated and vaguely baffled by the sight of them.

“That,” he said at last, “is a pigeon.”

“It is not. It’s a falcon.”

“A dying pigeon.”

“Aveline says it’s a falcon.”

“Aveline is a kind woman.”

“Shut up, serah, and deal the hand.”

“As soon as you remove your foot from my table, guardsman.”

—

“I have only recently learned to read,” Fenris admitted later, placing two more bottles of wine on the table.

“I saw the children’s primer by the stairs,” Donnic told him, shuffling his winning hand into the deck. “Besides, you never return any letters.”

“Perhaps it’s their author.”

“Or the penmanship,” Donnic said, and dealt.

—

“I’m in love with my wife.”

“That is no secret.”

“No,” Donnic agreed, “but it’s true.”

—

“I am,” Fenris started, then fell silent. One of his hands still splayed open on his cards; he could see the Lady’s eye twinkling up at him above the join of his thumb and forefinger. “I am,” he said again, and then, “you,” and then, “Hawke—”

Donnic shook his head, tipping the bottle until red wine spilled out into Fenris’s half-empty glass. “Keep that one,” he said. “Other ears need to hear it first.”

Fenris said nothing, and when his glass was full he lifted it to his lips and drained it dry.

—

He did not know the time. Somewhere near three, he thought, late enough to be early and early enough that not even the Chantry bells would ring the hour. Donnic had retired to the sofa with the sagging center cushion, his legs stretched out to the dying fire as he stared meditatively at his still-bare left foot. He shifted his toes in the flickering shadows and the falcon-pigeon flapped its wings; Fenris blinked the image away, blinked again at a world gone blurry, and sighed, returning his waning attention to the single-handed game of Wicked Grace he’d begun against himself.

Two Songs and the Knight of Mercy, and no help at all from the gloating purple harlequins dancing over the deck.  He drew a card.

“Anyone home?”

Aveline’s voice was loud and too cheerful for the hour, and Donnic rolled to a sitting position with a sudden look of alarm. “Here!” he called, scrubbing one hand over his face; Aveline strode through the open door, Hawke behind her, and Donnic lurched abruptly to his feet. “Captain! Aveline.” He wavered a bit and Aveline gripped his shoulder; then he focused on her face, and he said, more tenderly, “Hello, my dear.”

She leaned closer, smiling, shaking her head, and Fenris glanced away as Hawke bumped his chair with her hip. “Good evening?” she asked, nodding at the haphazard pile of empty bottles and abandoned, wine-thumbed cards.

“Good enough,” Fenris said, and tossed his hand to the table as he stood. “And yours?”

“Good enough,” parroted Hawke, reaching to touch the cards he’d thrown down. “The Angel of Death. Game’s over, I suppose.”

Donnic looked over then, more intently and lucidly than Fenris thought he had a right to, especially considering the arm he’d slung heavily over his wife’s shoulders to remain upright. “And you know what that means,” he stated, his voice serious—and then he smiled. “You must show your hand.”

“What did he mean?” Hawke asked later, once Aveline had coaxed her unsteady husband out the door at last, his forgotten boot dangling from her free hand.

“That,” Fenris said, suppressing a smirk, turning to gather the cards that had lost and won him the hand at once, “is a secret.”


	4. Drink Me (Sebastian + Bianca)

[foxghost](http://foxghost.tumblr.com) asked: Sebastian vael/Bianca, drink me

— **  
**

 **Characters/Pairing:** Sebastian + Bianca  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1,500   
 **Prompt:** Drink Me: one character toasts another.  
 **Summary:** Sebastian’s not quite sure how this happened, but now that he’s here, he’s going to see this through.

 

—

 

It’s just him, a single squat candle melting into itself in the center of the table, and the crossbow.

Sebastian knows he’s treading into dangerous territory being here like this, in silence, in secrecy. Varric is less than a stone’s throw away, leading his bi-weekly writing workshop in the Hanged Man’s noisy main room, and any moment might bring the dwarf back up the stairs for his pen-nibs or spare vellum or a thousand things that a storyteller would need to instruct others in the craft. But there’s another layer of danger here too, not something he can put his hands on but a threat as deadly as any pair of blades to the back.

It’s foolish. Sebastian _knows_ it’s foolish. But he’s been in Kirkwall too long and he’s read too much of Varric’s writing, and despite its foolishness he knows that sometimes Hawke’s jobs wrap up a little _too_ neatly; that not all of Varric’s tales are exaggerated for publication; that extraordinary things sometimes happen when a power he cannot understand demands it.

Which is, after all, why he’s here in Varric’s suite, a pair of Varric’s tumblers in one hand and a round bottle of pale wine in the other, sinking into a low chair set opposite a crossbow as if it is a normal, expected thing to do.

“What do you _mean_ you’ve never bought her a drink?” comes Isabela’s voice in his head again, strident and scandalized as he’s never heard her before, and Sebastian sighs as he sets the tumblers on the table with a hollow thunk.

They’d been out on the Coast on one of Hawke’s herb-gathering expeditions, and without the immediate threat of raiders or slavers flinging arrows at them from on high they’d actually managed to carry on an entire, pleasantly uninterrupted conversation. At least, until Sebastian had mentioned that one of Bianca’s bolts had nicked his ear in the last battle, and Isabela, Hawke, and Fenris alike had stopped midstep to stare at him.

And he thought Isabela had been _joking_ about the drinks _._ But when he’d asked Hawke had nodded and even Fenris had coughed into his fist and turned away, and then Isabela had cocked her hip and grinned and told him that considering his history, he ought to have known to court a lady properly before expecting her favor in battle. If it had been the one instance he would have ignored the thought completely—but with Isabela’s lifted eyebrow had come other memories, other incidents, his shoulder clipped with a bolt in flight, his hair rustled by something more than an errant breeze. Too many for coincidence.

So here he is, armor forgone in the favor of dark clothes better-suited for climbing tavern walls, plying another man’s crossbow with alcohol in the middle of the night.

“Well,” he says, popping the cork from the bottle of wine. “Bianca.”

The crossbow, predictably, makes no response. Instead it lies there where it has been placed on the table, balanced on one outstretched arm, tipped towards him as if in expectation.

Sebastian pours a finger of wine into each tumbler, then—almost without hesitation—pushes one of them across the table. It catches on one of the planked sections where the wood is uneven and the wine sloshes up the inside of the glass. “My apologies,” Sebastian murmurs out of habit, and shakes his head at himself as he places the glass just inside the curve of Bianca’s reach.  The lone, stubby candle’s light catches along the ripples of wine, circling gold streaks until the almond-pale surface smoothes out again, settles.  

She really is a magnificent weapon, Sebastian thinks, leaning back in his chair, all sleek lines and polished wood and just the right arrangement of grooves and strings. Even the mechanical bits of which he normally disapproves have their own sort of shine that makes them more than metal, more than gears and steel shafts: something else, something—elegant. Something beautiful.

“Bianca,” he says again; then he adds, because it seems right, “Lady.” In Starkhaven he would have bowed over her hand; here, he settles for a respectful inclination of his head. His head. For a _crossbow._

He is not nearly drunk enough for this.

He takes a sip—gulp, really, if he’s honest with himself—of wine, then replaces the glass on the table. A raucous cry echoes up from downstairs and Sebastian glances to the door, tensing, but there is no subsequent patter of dwarven feet on the stairs, no cheerful tenor heralding his imminent demise.

“Maker preserve me,” he says to himself, and his fingers tighten around the glass. “I _will_ have done with this. Lady,” he adds, louder. “I hope you’ll forgive my rudeness for not coming to you earlier. It was an oversight on my part to deny you the courtesy of a proper introduction.”

As he expects, Bianca says nothing. But for a split-second light gleams on her untensed string and he thinks, startled, that it—she— _it_ is pleased—and then, abruptly, the moment is gone again.

“That is,” he continues awkwardly, unsettled, “we have fought together now for some years. And it has been—brought to my attention, as it were, that I have long owed you recognition for your efforts in battle. I consider my own longbow a worthy partner in my efforts, and though he lacks your—character, I would be displeased to find him—it—disparaged as a simple tool bent to the strength of my arm.”

Sebastian takes another sip and leans forward, caught up in his own thoughts. “You truly are a marvel,” he says to Bianca, and means it. “I think that even if the greatest archer in the world took hold of you, and the greatest dwarven smith in the world tuned your springs to his liking, no bolt would ever fly as true for him as they do for Varric.”

There is _definitely_ a glib star-flash along her string this time, but Sebastian knows even as he says it that it is true. “There is something to be said for trust in one’s partner, whether or not that partner is… Hm. Vocal.”

There is a pause, and Sebastian lifts his glass to his lips. Wood cannot creak amusedly, he tells himself. A gear cannot tighten with a sound like a snicker without a hand to twist it.

Candlelight winks along Bianca’s string again, and this time it chases all the way down her polished oaken shaft to twinkle at the molded, well-used grip.

“Oh, no,” Sebastian says hurriedly. “I couldn’t dare. I mentioned the cocking ring _once_ and learned my lesson swiftly enough—you will not ensnare me in such a trap again.”

He blinks. Are her arms— _flexing?_

Sebastian stands, planting both hands on either side of his glass, and is pleased to find the table both solid and thoroughly, reassuringly impassive. “Good night, Lady,” he says, looking everywhere but at the temptress lying so innocently across from him. “Bianca. It was a pleasure. Truly, we must meet again soon—or rather, Varric ought to bring you by. The Chantry, I mean. If you like.”

Then—footsteps. _Varric’s_ footsteps, too, because of _course_ Varric is coming, because of course Sebastian wants nothing more than to get away unseen after a dalliance with another man’s crossbow. But he is not without his own skills, and before the key finishes turning in the lock Sebastian is out the window, sure-footed and silent despite his haste, sequestered in the shadows gathered in the alley below.

“ _Well_ ,” comes Varric’s voice above him, and Sebastian flattens himself further against the wall. “That went surprisingly well, considering how few of them had ever heard of iambic pentam—”

There is a sudden, awful silence, and Sebastian remembers with painful clarity the two tumblers laid out on the table, the rounded bottle of sacramental wine pilfered from the Chantry’s stores at the last minute.

“Bianca,” Varric says then, his voice at once wry and terrifyingly precise, as if its owner meant to pitch it towards any listening ears below his window. “You’ve been courting again. I thought we handled this after the last few times Rivaini came calling while I was out.”

Silence—and the pointed creak of a tightening string. Sebastian doesn’t think it’s Bianca’s will at work this time. “Damnation,” he breathes, leaning his head back against the brick; he sidles sideways, pulling the whole of his training to the soles of his feet, his hands, the insistent weight of stealth. Varric’s head appears at the window—but by then Sebastian is free, safe in the dubious sanctuary of Lowtown’s streets proper, and despite the gravity of the situation he cannot help his smile.

A lady courted—and a lady’s favor given. “Your servant,” he murmurs, bowing from the waist in her direction; then he throws his cloak back over his shoulders and, thinking of laughter caught along a bowstring, Sebastian sets off into the night.


	5. Yahoo Me (F!Hawke/Fenris)

  
[girl-chama ](http://girl-chama.tumblr.com)asked you: “Yahoo me!” :D

— **  
**

**C** **haracters/Pairing:** Fenris/F!Hawke  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1,300   
 **Prompt:** Yahoo Me: the characters celebrate something.  
 **Summary:** Sometimes, two people having a quiet conversation in the dark is a greater victory than any battlefield.

**Recommended Listening:**[Los Angeles](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smH3-JqEwoA) by Peter Bradley Adams.

 

—

 

“Do you know what today is?”

Fenris looks at her without lifting his head. Every bit of him is lazy, loose, his hair falling pale and tousled over his eyes, the fabric of her bedspread draping heavy from his bent knee over his waist, his thigh. For once he is all curves and nothing hard: the swoops and curls of lyrium over his bared chest, rounding and easing again as he breathes; the dim firelight pooling gold in the hollow of his throat, in the bend of his elbow where he has tucked one hand beneath his head—

His eyes, open and unguarded in contentment. The half-curve of his smile.

Hawke rolls to her stomach, pillowing her head on her arms. Fenris’s gaze slides down the curve of her back to where the covers spill over her naked hip; then his eyes come back to hers, and Hawke smiles herself at his expression. “Today,” she says again. “Do you realize what it is?”

“No. Should I?”

“Maybe not. It’s sheer chance I remember myself.”

Fenris lets out a deep sigh, the sound meant to mock but emerging utterly relaxed instead, and closes his eyes. “And do you intend to dangle this secret before me all night?”

Hawke hums and resettles herself on her arms, flicking her hair away from her face. “That depends on how stubborn you are about guessing it, I suppose.”

“I despise guessing games.”

“And I happen to love them. Whatever’s a girl to do?”

“Find less-tiresome entertainment,” Fenris suggests, the corner of his mouth quirking.

“Impossible. Your continued refusal to spar against my sparkling wit is all that keeps me going some days.”

“If ‘wit’ is meant to be ‘unreasonable persistence.’”

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Three years ago today,” says Hawke, dramatic as if she is announcing Orlesian nobility, “you came creeping into my foyer to tell me you were very upset about Hadriana’s death.”

His eyes come open again at that, his smile shrinking, but Hawke knows Fenris well enough to see he is neither upset nor disturbed by the memory—only startled, and counting backwards in his head. “Already three?” he asks himself, his eyes distant with time. “What is the date?”

“Fifteenth Kingsway.”

“I don’t—remember.”

“I wouldn’t have either if it hadn’t been precisely a month before my nameday. Aveline mentioned it today and I realized she was right.”

He turns on his side to face her then, propping his head on his hand. “There are some things about that time I would change.”

“And some I wouldn’t,” she points out. Fenris looks at her but says nothing, conceding her the issue, and Hawke hides her smile in the crook of her elbow. “Besides,” she adds, lifting an eyebrow, “I’ve been thinking up some _wonderful_ ways for you to make up all those missed anniversaries.”

“Ah,” Fenris says. “Extortion.”

Hawke laughs, reaching up to tug at a bit of the white hair over his eyes. Fenris grimaces but allows it, and after a moment Hawke relents, sliding her fingers fully into his hair and over his scalp, tracing an aimless path along his temple, behind his pointed ear, down the dip at the nape of his neck. “Oh, yes,” she tells him softly, watching his eyelids flutter and close and open again, his expression somewhere between pleasure and deep suspicion. “Extortion as you’ve never _dreamed_.”

His voice is lower than usual, rumbling with her ministrations. “Explain.”

“Three poems.”

“What?”  
  
“Three poems,” Hawke says again, careful to keep her hand moving through his hair, careful to keep her tone perfectly reasonable. “Penned by your own hand, delivered one each morning with a single red rose by my breakfast-table. You may give them to Orana for delivery.”

His eyes come open at that, narrowed slits of green focusing on her face like arrows pinning quarry before a kill, but he says nothing, waiting, patient and inscrutable. Hawke bites down hard on the inside of her cheek before continuing. “Then, at noon on the third day, I will put on my mother’s best courting gown from the attic and meet you in the square. It’s a bit old-fashioned and I think you could fit four people under the skirt, but the velvet ribbons have hardly mildewed at all.”

Fenris’s eyebrows shoot up like a line has yanked them—but a moment later Hawke sees the start of a curling smile. “And then?” he asks.

Oh, _damn_ , she thinks, and laughs. She’s oversold it. But—oh well. She rather likes this next bit. “A healthy constitutional. We will tour the estates like a perfectly respectable couple and have perfectly respectable conversations about the weather and hors d’oeuvres and pointed shoes, and then you will return me safely to my front door with nothing more than a perfunctory hand to my elbow.”

“Chaperoned?”

“Naturally.”

“And a polite farewell.”

“As reserved as possible.”

He leans closer, then, close enough that Hawke’s hand slides free of his hair, her fingertips trailing down the back of his neck and along his spine, pausing, pressing gently into the warm shift of muscle and skin between the blades of his shoulders. “And then?”

“And then,” she tells him, her voice dropping with deep secrecy, “in the dark of night when everyone’s asleep and there’s only the moon to guide you, you’ll climb the rose-covered trellis against the wall, slip in through my conveniently-unlocked window—to a breathless string sonata, if you can get the musicians—and make mad, passionate love to me until first light.”

Fenris stares—and he drops his forehead against her own and laughs, soft but unreserved, his shoulder shaking where it presses against her own, his thumb ghosting over her throat as he lifts his hand to her cheek. “Hawke,” he says, “you have no trellis.”

“No trellis,” she agrees as he lowers his head to her pillow beside her, so close her nose brushes against his as she turns to him. “And no roses.”

“And no musicians.”

“And no window wide enough for you to fit through.”

“Not easily,” Fenris says, and Hawke closes her eyes. He has settled near enough that she can feel the brush of his lips over the arch of her cheek, the rise and fall of his chest, the low steady thumps of his heart; she thinks a moment of another year, another night, a fat round moon like this one and a different ending altogether—and a beginning for them both. Less easy, perhaps, and with less warmth in its making, but no less precious to her for the pain of it.

Hawke opens her eyes. Fenris is watching her, quietly, his eyes half-lidded and golding with the flicker of firelight, and when she places the flat of her palm against his chest where the lyrium curves together to become one piece, he shifts closer to meet her, to keep her hand at his heart.

Oh, but she loves him.

“I suppose,” she whispers thickly, smiling, “we’ll have to make do with what we have.”

His mouth is against her mouth, not quite a press, not quite a kiss. “And what is that?”

“The moon,” she says, and his fingers smooth over the skin at the small of her back. “You. Me. A promise of first light.”

“Hawke,” he says, and she shivers at the warmth there, at the gentleness, at the lazy curling affection that twines around her name, “this is enough.”

She smiles to keep her heart from her throat. “Next year I want roses.”

Fenris laughs, and nods, and presses his hand against her back with the promise; then he kisses her, and though there are no roses, no poems, no musicians’ strings to mark the sweetness of the moment—it is perfect.


	6. Drink Me [Redux] (F!Hawke/Fenris)

  
[rubyvroom](http://rubyvroom.tumblr.com) asked you: fenris/f!hawke, drink me

—

 **Characters/Pairing:** Fenris/F!Hawke  
 **Rating:** T  
 **Word Count:** 6000 (oh my goodness, this one got away from me!)  
 **Prompt:** Drink Me: two characters drink, separately or together.  
 **Summary:** They have two long unwinding roads behind them, and the important places are marked with empty glasses.

 **Recommended Listening:**[Frysta](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvVEY2Emy1U) by Olafur Arnalds.

 

—

 

She is ten and her brother is five and her sister is five, too, and the wind is sharp enough that it slices between the walls and the door despite the blankets her mother has wedged in the cracks, cold enough to frost the quilts they four have wrapped around each other even before the roaring hearth-fire, loud enough that the howling rattles the windows and shakes the door and thumps at the roof like a wild demon seeking entrance to their souls. The snow is high as the sills and growing higher, swallowing them up in the way a quiet tide rises black in the night to leave no trace of them behind, and though she is the eldest and the tallest and her father has told her to be brave, her heart trembles to think of him out alone, lost, wandering, seeking a house that has been eaten by snow and swallowed in the dark.

“Are you afraid?” her mother asks, her voice gentle, her heavy shawl pulled close around her shoulders, touching first Carver’s head, then Bethany’s, disturbing neither of them from their uneasy sleep on her lap.

“No,” she says, and lifts her chin. “Father promised to come home.”

Her mother smiles, then, and warms the room with it; moth-like she draws closer, drawn by love’s open light. Her mother stretches out her hand and strokes her hair and she feels the knot in her heart break a little, undone, giving way to simple surety. “He will come,” her mother murmurs, and because her mother says it, it is true.

And it is true, she finds, when less than an hour later the front door blows open and the storm thrusts her father through, blustering and blowing snow into the corners like an angry maid with a broom, winds sneaking in through the blankets with chilled fingers as her mother rises.

“He’ll live,” her father says through four layers of scarf, ice cracking in his voice. His fingers are gloved thick as sausages and clumsy on his coat as he tries to unbutton it, and when her mother pulls his hat from his head a fresh torrent of snow sifts down over his shoulders. “He broke the leg clean through, but the mending was easy enough. He won’t even have much of a scar.” Her father pauses, his unwound scarf draping over one ungloved hand. “Unless he wants one, I suppose. Flames! I should have asked.”

“Malcolm!”

Her father winks at her where she still sits by the fire, watching, and then turns to his wife. “Never fear, love. The boy will live unscarred and we will live undiscovered. Here,” he adds, smiling, and pulls from his overcoat a large bottle of amber liquid that catches the firelight like gold. “Healer’s fee.”

“He owes you more than that for calling you out in this weather,” her mother says, pursing her lips, but instead of putting the bottle away with the others in the locked cabinet above the stove she looks thoughtfully at her husband, and then at her daughter, and then she fetches two little clear glasses from the china cabinet and brings them over to the fire.

Her father joins them, most of his coats shed, his snow-crusted boots puddling on the rush mat by the front door, and without a word he lifts her into his lap, quilts and all. Bethany and Carver have curled together before the fire, their tousled dark heads nestled against each other; Carver snores, just a little, and moves closer to his sister, and though her father’s chest is cold even through the blankets, and though she is the eldest and the bravest, she tucks her head under her father’s chin and listens to his heart beating.

Her mother pours out the liquor in a smooth, gleaming fall, and hands one of the glasses to her father. “For the cold,” her mother suggests, one eyebrow lifted, and raises the glass to her lips.

“Naturally,” her father says, and there is something burning in the word, something burning in her mother’s eyes—but the moment is a candle’s breath, there and gone again, and after a long swallow her father hands her his own glass. “Here. Try it.”

“Malcolm—”

“Just a sip! Just a sip,” he adds to her, grinning in conspiracy, “or I’ll be out in the storm again.”

She looks to her mother, uncertain—but though her mother shakes her head she is smiling, just a little, and very, very carefully, she lifts the glass to her mouth and takes a sparrow’s swallow of whiskey. It burns and she coughs, her eyes watering, her throat closing—but as she swallows she warms too, a little fire-bright coal dropping right into her heart to burn there.

This is how she falls asleep: her head on her father’s heartbeat, her mother’s voice and his entwining over her head, low and gentle, and heat unfurling in her chest, spreading out behind her ribs like wings.

—

He is eight and his sister is six, and he does not like the dry heat of Minrathous. Seheron is already fading in his memory, the traders’ laughing voices giving way to slavers’ shouts in the city marketplace, the soft undyed tents yielding to blazing scarlet banners that glare down at him with golden eyes, but even now he cannot forget the way the hot, wet warmth of the jungles wrapped around his skin, nor the way the sunlight filtered down in a heavy haze between the broadest leaves when he walked beneath them, one hand upstretched to their light-limned edges.

His mother wishes him to forget these things, he knows. Their master does not approve of daydreams.

But for all their master’s power he cannot yet open a heart with his hand nor read a mind with his eyes, and so despite the risk of it he lets himself dream and he lets himself remember. He ducks around a woman with her arms full of dirty linens and thinks of the thick-boled trees dripping with vines; he passes under an awning’s shadow and sees the tent-roof of their unburnt home; he lifts the curtain to his family’s room and it is the little waterfall that tumbled down the rocks at the mouth of the creek, cool and dim and whispering secrets he could almost understand.

“There you are,” says his mother without turning from where she kneels, her voice flat, her shoulders curved, and Seheron is gone. Her hands work a lump of pale dough on a stained cheesecloth, kneading, twisting, unceasing in their movement. “Help your sister with the candles.”

The room is dim with shadows thrown by the rags strung over the window, thin shafts of dry sunlight choked with dust piercing the places where the weft has worn thin, mottling pale the far wall, his sister’s shoulder where she sits at a worn basket, the red-gold of her hair where it falls from its tail. She looks up and smiles to see him, sweet enough for the bruise on her cheek, and when he crosses to her she passes him the packet of brass pins. The bedroll they share is thin but not as thin as nothing, and he sighs as he dumps a handful of slender white candles to the blanket between them.

They are quiet a long time. The work is mindless enough that he can dream and he does so, for a while, pretending the pins he pushes into the soft wax to mark the candle’s hours are like the game he used to play with pebbles placed on a straight and balanced branch, dropped just so into position without weighing down one side or the other too heavily. Varania had been too little to play with him then; he does not know where he could get a branch in the city but there are pebbles enough, and if he is very good for the next week perhaps he will have a chance to ask the overseer for—

“ _Leto_!” snaps his father, and the brass pin drives hard through the candle and into the soft flesh of his thumb. He knows better than to cry out—but the pin is thick and sharp and it _hurts_ , and despite his best efforts tears sting fiercely behind his eyes. His mother’s hands thud into her lump of dough without pause, without breaking, steady and dead.

“Stop that,” his father says to his trembling lip, and then, “stand up. Come here.”

He stands, his thumb clenched into his fist, and goes. Varania’s eyes are huge above the bruise. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No. I am sold.” His father’s voice is bitter as the colus leaves that lined the jungle paths, and for once there is no sanctuary in the memory of his home. His mother’s hands still do not stop their kneading. “I’m to go with Erisus in an hour. To Marnus Pell.”

“Father—”

“Be quiet. Listen to me.”

“But—”

His father grips his shoulder with tight, pinching fingers, the hold cruel enough to make him cry out. “Your mother,” he says, his eyes fierce and wild and blazing as the sun through the jungle’s trees, “your sister. You will protect them, Leto. Do you understand me?”

“Y—yes.”

“Swear it.”

“Father—”  
  
“Swear it!”

“I swear it!”

His father thrusts him from him, then, and fumbles into the pouch at his waist. Ceramic clinks against steel and for an instant he thinks wildly of a knife—but instead his father pulls out a small flat dish and a tiny jug of sweet wine, and with trembling hands he pours the wine into the dish until it spills over the rim. “Hold this,” he says. “Give me your hand.”

He does, trembling himself; his father grasps the thumb that had been pierced and squeezes harshly, the skin turning white under the pressure until a fat drop of blood falls heavy from the end of his nail. Then his father snatches up a dropped pin from the ground and pierces his own forefinger, and with a motion almost frantic does the same to his own thumb until his blood has mixed with his son’s in the pale wine.

“Drink it.”

He does not want to—he does not like the sight of blood—but his father curves his weathered, work-callused hands around his son’s, pressing, pushing, until the cool ceramic touches his lips. “Drink it,” his father commands him. “You’ve made the oath of a man; seal it as one.”

So he does, his eyes wide, three swallows until the dish is empty. He is not a man—he _cannot_ be, not yet. He has too many dreams. His master will not approve.

“There,” says his father, and when the dish is empty he smashes it on the ground in one quick movement and yanks his ancient, rusted dagger from beneath the other bedroll. “Remember this,” he says without looking at his children, and Varania begins to cry.

He cannot move. He is frozen from the inside out, his veins iced over, the jungle heat of Seheron a lifetime gone and less than a ghost of a memory. His father pauses once at the doorway, his edges caught in cold light, his face turned back to the shadow where his mother kneels; then he draws in a quick breath and is gone.

Two days later, they hear word of a slave killed in assault of its master on the road to Marcus Pell. Varania does not understand. Leto does, and as he watches his mother’s face settle into frozen stone, he thinks of wine, but he tastes only the hot bitter bite of blood.

—

She is fifteen and her idiot brother ruins everything.

The girl hadn’t even been _nice_ , idiot Elara with her idiot beautiful face who kept dipping Bethany’s braid in ink, but Carver’s big mouth is apparently a perfect match to Elara’s and her templar father’s, because thanks to all three of them here they are again, wandering Hawkes, mules hitched in the dead of night to a wagon loaded with all their earthly possessions as they fly from yet another town.

She’d _liked_ West River, with its view of the Wilds and the cosy Chantry and the winding creek with the bridge that had lined the edge of the fields. Stupid Carver. Stupid _her,_ for not thinking quick enough to stop him when he’d opened his mouth. Bethany had been so excited about Summerday, too, promised by Mother Gera she’d get to light one of the candles at the service, and now instead they’re starting over _again—_

She lets out a short, sharp sigh of frustration and shoves her hair behind her ears with one hand, tightening her grip on the mules’ reins with the other. Her mother is in the wagon behind her with Bethany, asleep; her father and Carver walk just past the edge of the rutted dirt road, little more than shadows glinting here and there with crisp moonlight, her father’s hand on her brother’s shoulder, her brother’s hands clenched at his sides. They walk there a long time, quietly, her father’s voice little more than a bee’s hum in the darkness. Carver says nothing at all.

They reach an inn just past midnight. It is not large, and not overly clean—but it is warm and dry and the mistress kind enough to put what is left of their dinner’s stew over the fire, and by the time they have cleared their cracked wooden bowls her anger is not so hard to swallow, either. Carver looks only at his spoon, even when Bethany throws him tearful looks.

“Malcolm,” her mother says, then, “why don’t you put the twins to bed?”

Her parents share a look, and then her father goes, Bethany’s hand tight in his and Carver close behind, and her mother takes her sister’s empty seat and pushes her untouched cup of mead across the table. “Don’t tell your father,” she adds dryly at her daughter’s look.

She takes a sip, looks down into the mug, cups both hands around its cool surface and watches the sweet honey-gold liquid settle again, smooth and flawless as if it had never been upended, never had its world spun around it without even a word of warning. “I’m _so_ angry at Carver,” she says, suddenly, and is startled by the sound of it.

“I know, darling,” says her mother. “But he’s your brother. You can’t fight with him forever.”

“I can fight with him tonight,” she mutters obstinately, and takes another, longer swallow. “He ruined everything.”

“He’s ten.”

“I had my magic by ten. _I_ never told anyone and made the whole family pack up and leave.”

“No?” her mother asks, gently, and she flushes from throat to cheek. She knows what her mother means—a girl she’d thought a friend, and a pond not quite warm enough to swim in, and a long, embarrassed, tearful journey north—and she drops her eyes to the cup again.

“I won’t be upset with him tomorrow,” she says. “I promise.”

Her mother touches her hand. “You can be upset, darling. But you must also be kind. Your brother is angry too.”

“Because we’re all mages and he isn’t.”

“Because he put your sister—and your father—and _you—_ in danger. He doesn’t want you hurt because of his careless words.”

She thumbs a chip in the cup’s handle, inexplicable tears pricking behind her eyes, and her mother’s hands slide from her wrist to her chin to tip it up, until their faces are level. “So,” she says, swallowing once, and then again, “I should not be careless with my words, either.”

“My girl,” her mother murmurs, and then she smiles so warmly something aches behind her heart. “What a wonderful woman you’re turning out to be.”

She does cry at that, just a little, and that night, when Carver crawls into her bed whispering _sorry, sorry, sorry_ , she pulls him close the way a big sister should and tells him _don’t worry, everything is fine, I love you_.

—

He is seventeen and he is dead drunk.

The room is very dark—or are his eyes closed? He cannot remember; he opens them as wide as they can go and snorts a laugh when he stumbles over a sleeping body in the darkness. His mother makes a soft, crooning moan like a wounded bird and rolls away from his dirty feet, and he takes two—three—four uncertain steps before hitting the wall hard with both palms.

He laughs again and sinks down against it, leaning his head back against the cool dusty stone and staring blindly at the narrow strips of starlight at the edges of their door’s curtained opening. “Done,” he whispers to himself, and covers his face with his hand.

“Are you—are you _drunk?_ ” Varania’s voice hisses out of the shadows like a coiled viper and he flinches away, startled, unsettled by the venom. “You _are_ ,” she says, sitting up from her pile of thin blankets in the corner, and her hair tumbles down around her shoulders. “All that silver—Leto, how could you?”

“Leave it,” he tells her, or he hopes he tells her, and drops to his side on his pallet, turning away from her without bothering to undress. There is a crack in the clay wall a handspan high, and as he watches it it seems to lengthen first one way and then the other, stretching across the whole of his vision until he blinks it back to dimmer starlight.

“What have you done?”

He does not answer. A moment later he hears the spindle-crack of her magic snapping flame to a candle, and meager yellow light spills over his shoulder and the side of his nose. He closes his eyes.

“Leto,” Varania says, and when he still does not answer she kicks him hard in the ankle.

He bites back a snarl and props himself to one elbow, candlelight smearing across his eyes, and glares. “Leave me alone.”

“Not until you tell me what you’ve done.”

“Lower your voice!”

She kicks him again, hard enough to hurt. “Tell me!”

He is angry—he is drunk— “I entered the tournament!”

“You—” she says, her voice a ghost—then she pushes to her knees and fists a hand in his worn shirt to drag him closer. “You are a _bastard_.”

He looks at his sister, his foolish, skinny, fifteen-year-old _brat_ of a mageling, her eyes hard as diamonds and glittering, her mouth pulled hard and tight to keep her lips steady. “You know what our master does to slaves with magic.”

“I do _not_ need your protection.”

“The victor wins a boon of the magister.”

“Victor!” she scoffs, disdain dripping from her teeth, fury in her tongue. “You will die in the third round.”

“I will win.”

“You will _die_ ,” Varania says, and after she releases his shirt she slaps him open-handed across the face. He stares at her, astonished, lifts one hand to touch the sharp sting under his eye; her tears are gone, now, her cheeks white with anger and despair. “You will die and you will leave us alone.”

“I will win,” he says again, but the words are empty of hope, an offering to a deafened god. Varania flings herself back to her blankets, her spine stiff as a rail, and does not move again.

He watches her a long time. The cheap candle burns down, then gutters; he licks his fingers and pinches it to smoke, and then he stands and pushes the curtain aside to lean against the open doorway, crossing his arms over his chest, listening to the sounds of twoscore slaves settling around them for the night, just as they have the night before this and the night before that.

There is a step behind him near the second hour. Varania comes forward without a word, without looking at him, and sits silently by his feet in the doorway. Her shoulders are still stiff against the clay wall, her hands still knotted with anger, but soon enough her head comes to rest against his knee, and though the movement is not gentle it is sure.

  
Like this, they wait for dawn.

—

She is eighteen and she is in love.

He is tall and tow-headed and the son of the blacksmith, and as gentle as a pup with Bethany and Carver when they visit. More than once her sideways glances have caught him glancing back, and when one night he comes awkwardly to the window beneath the room she shares with Bethany, bringing with him a fistful of wildflowers and a genuine grin, she laughs and takes her father’s bottle of whiskey, too.

They spend the night in the barn’s loft, watching the stars through the skylight, watching each other drink from the same place on the rim, testing with fingertips and mouths and half-gasped words the things they had not known before. They spend the summer like this and the fall, too, in lofts and by the banks of Lothering’s little river, under the oak his mother planted when he was born, in her father’s fields, sunlit and warm. The whiskey comes along with them more often than not, but if her father notices, he never mentions it.

(She knows he notices.)

It is, though she is not fond of the word, idyllic. Her mother even hints at marriage, once or twice, though her blacksmith’s son says nothing of it and she is not ready for the word herself, can hardly even imagine it: _wife_. She tells her mother this and laughs at the thought; her mother sighs and smiles and shakes her head, and her father leans his elbows on his knees and tells her, grinning, to save them all the trouble of planning and run off to Denerim instead.

But dreams, she knows better than many, are never things to be trusted, not when they are perfect, and when one day an accident crushes his hand in the forge they come to a gentle end. There is no one else near them and the injury is beyond simple splinting; so she heals him, carefully, quietly, her hands cupping magic like water, his fingers realigning themselves, the pain in his eyes giving way to the deeper wound of betrayal.

“I’m sorry,” she tells him afterwards, when he clutches his hand to his chest and listens to the lies that slip so easily between them, even after this, even after everything. “My parents don’t know. You’re the only one.”

“You never told me.”

“I was afraid.”

“I loved you,” he says helplessly, and she says, just as grieved, “So did I.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” he says, later, once the forge is cleaned and his hand is straight and they have both put away their hearts. She fumbles for a moment at the counter behind him; then she thrusts the nearly-empty bottle of whiskey into his hands.

“Keep this,” she tells him. “My mother doesn’t like liquor in the house anyway.”

He thumbs the glass corner and musters up a half-smile that knocks her breath from her chest. He says, quietly, “It was good while it lasted.”

“It was,” she agrees, and makes it halfway home before she starts to cry.

—

He doesn’t know how old he is.

He wonders about it, once, when he hears another magister discussing the ages of two of his stud slaves, but his master says it does not matter and so he does not think of it again. It is not his place to wonder, after all. He knows better now than to spend his thoughts on anything besides his master’s will.

“Fenris,” his master says, and he steps forward smoothly, one hand cupping the base of the silver decanter, the other wrapped just so along the elegant curve of the handle so that the lyrium is on full display. The markings are still tender, even after two years; he is grateful that the wine is not chilled tonight.

The Agreggio spills out in a smooth crimson stream, swelling inside the crystal of the woman’s glass like an opened wound. Her fingers are long and elegant and adorned with many rings where they hold the stem, and when he bows to her and withdraws he can feel the weight of her curving smile settle heavy over his shoulders. The next course comes and she leans closer to his master, whispering, flirting, flicking her eyes at the watching slave in clear suggestion. Danarius leans back in his chair and lifts an eyebrow—and smiles.

His heart begins to race. He knows how this will end—wine licked from the end of his master’s fingers, or the woman’s mouth, or the stone between his master’s feet—and he knows too that this is as much a test as any other task his master has set before him. He has not failed his master yet; he will not fail him here, either.

Danarius nods, approving, and even as a hot rush of pride swells in his throat his mouth goes dry, half-sick with anticipation and anxiety; the lyrium flickers up his arms in lines of white fire and his master smiles to see it, lazy, amused, gaze hot and open with lust. The woman twists in her chair to see what he stares at; when she realizes she lets out a light, beautiful laugh and lifts her wineglass to her lips. Fenris watches her helplessly, locked in place like a hare pinned by a hawk, her many rings burning bronze in the torchlight as she pinches the stem of her glass. Her throat opens and closes and opens again as she swallows, her eyes heavy-lidded and languid, and when the glass is empty she draws her tongue around its rim in a smooth circle.

“Don’t _tease_ my wolf, Hadriana,” Danarius murmurs, though the words are pitched for Fenris, and the woman smiles, white teeth between lips stained scarlet.

—

She is twenty and her father is dead.

The world is cold for spring—or she is cold, she can’t tell. The pyre burns hot enough to make her sweat and bright enough to sting her eyes with light and smoke, but she cannot feel the tips of her fingers and her teeth chatter like a child’s in winter. Her mother is tall as a statue in her veil and she doesn’t know how she has the _strength_ —but Bethany is strong too, and Carver, and she-the-eldest-and-the-bravest is the one with trembling knees among them.

Eventually, Carver—fifteen and a head taller than her now—takes her elbow and guides her home. She sits at the kitchen table where he places her, staring at the golden grain of the wood her father had sanded and stained and polished, unmoving until the funeral ends and the entire town comes to their house to help them grieve.

Malcolm Hawke fished my son out of the river once. He helped me bring in half the harvest when my plow broke three summers back. He patched my roof the day after that terrible storm. Such a _nice_ man, that Hawke was. So kind. Do you remember? Do you remember?

“Oh, flames,” she breathes, and pushes up from the table. Someone has brought a crock of homemade liquor with a black ribbon tied around its throat; she plucks it from the table without ceremony, slipping out the back door, breaking into a dead run until she is so deep in the grain fields her father sowed that she cannot hear their consolations.

Then she lies flat on her back, crushing half the stems beneath her, and yanks the cork from the bottle. The smell alone is enough to burn her nose, but she screws her eyes shut and takes three long swallows, scalding the back of her throat and making her cough like she hasn’t in years. The sky is very blue; she watches it deepen with noon, shading her face with her arm, drinking, listening to the empty place in her heart where her father used to be.

It’s old Barlin that finds her there eventually, tramping back through the same fields on the way to his own farm. He looks at her upside down, his broad-brimmed hat shading his face and hers.

“What are you doing?”

“Grieving,” she says—slurs—and wipes her mouth with the heel of her hand.

“Well, hurry up,” he tells her, and looks back to the east fields. “ _Someone_ has to be Hawke for your family now.”

—

He is four weeks without his master, and he is weakening. The Fog Warriors are very kind—too kind, for a slave missing his master—and despite his every effort they will not leave him be. He eats because he must be strong and hale, but he cannot pretend there is not something familiar in the food that makes his heart race; he trains because he must be honed as his blade, but he cannot say the way the heavy wet heat of the island curls around him does not loosen something long clenched in his chest.

One of the women goes hunting and invites him; he goes without knowing why, his feet silent on the jungle floor, steady in his path as if he knows it. Sunlight filters down in great swaths around broad green leaves, dappling the woman into shadow before him, and when she disappears to stalk her prey he stays where he is instead, breathing the secrets of the shadows that he can almost understand. There are thick-boled trees all around him, wide at the trunk and smooth with years, untouched by Tevinter magisters or qunari blades, known only to these warriors he has found himself with. His eyes fall closed despite himself, the sound of insects and far-distant voices and an unseen stream all blending together, sharpening, striking something deep inside him that he cannot name.

He draws in a breath, looks up, into the sun, and stretches up one hand to touch a leaf edged in light. It is only an instant, but he thinks this might be—

_Careful, slave, careful. Be wary. There is no home for you but me._

He wonders, suddenly—is this true?

Later that evening he joins the warriors for the evening meal, and for the first time in his living memory he does not once wait for his master’s leave to sit. All around him are people laughing, talking, trading stories and food alike as if there is no difficulty to it, and though Fenris cannot quite mimic their ease he thinks he understands the reason of it. The woman he’d hunted with smiles at him from her husband’s other side, twining her fingers through his between their knees, and gestures at the dishes of strong, clear liquor laid out in the center.

“Choose one for yourself,” she says around a mouthful of sweet berries. Her husband shakes his head in mock chagrin and she kisses his cheek, unabashed, unashamed.

“Thank you,” Fenris says, and—he does.

—

She is twenty-three, and this is the worst year of her life.

Bethany is dead. Carver will barely speak to her. Her mother drifts between grief and hard bitter anger like a broken spar tossed by the sea, surfacing only moments here and there with the gentle affection that had once been so easy. Even Gamlen is little better, a quarter-century of old grievances rising like accursed darkspawn to poison the house around them.

The third night in a row Meeran’s jobs send her home bloodied, she makes it two steps in the door before Gamlen’s glare and Carver’s sulk and her mother’s grief flood over her like physical things, a cold tidewater swell dragging at her heart to pull her under.

“Enough,” she snaps, sick past death of sorrow, and she grabs Carver by the arm. “Everyone, get up. Right now. We’re going out.”

It takes some convincing for her mother and a little more for Carver, obstinate only for the sake of it, but before long they are at a tiny scratched table in the Hanged Man, wedged between a group of card-playing sailors and a laughing pair of off-duty guards. She ignores her mother’s wide eyes, ignores too Gamlen’s suspicious stare, and when Norah makes her way to the table orders a bottle and a dozen shots of the strongest swill Corff has to offer.

“What—” starts her mother, but she cuts her off.

“We,” she says, “are going to drink together as a family. Mother, Uncle, the bottle’s for you. The shots—” she adds, cutting her eyes at Carver, “are so _we_ can bond.”

Carver snorts and rolls his eyes—but by the end of the night he is laughing, and Gamlen is grinning, and when Norah collects the empty glasses and calls her Hawke her mother smiles, and nods, and tucks her hand into her daughter’s arm.

“Your father would be so proud,” she whispers, and though it’s not quite healing, not really, Hawke knows how it feels to have the knot in one’s heart begin to loosen.

—

Three years gone and he’s running, running, running—death at his heels and the whip behind it, and he cannot run far enough. A ship’s belly bears him south until he’s found in Llomerynn; he bribes another captain for passage to Ostwick, and though he spends the voyage crammed in the cargo hold with four barrels of pickled eels, his sword is sharp and his eyes are sharper and Ostwick finds him undiscovered by his hunters.

He travels west, because Kirkwall is large enough to lose himself and find information at the same time, and because he has heard the Circle there to be strong enough to keep the mages back. The city is divided into districts; he finds a disreputable inn in the poorer section that asks no questions and takes a small room, and for three days he watches the traders of the city ply their wares.

Eventually, he settles on a dwarf: on hard enough times not to wonder at the coin, friendly enough to be trusted with the task, simple enough not to think of spreading word of the elf approaching him with questionable work. He meets Anso at a tavern in Lowtown, wine at his elbow, ale for the dwarf, and pushes both the flagon and a small purse across the table.

He says, “Find me someone who will fight.”

—

Two hours and one shade-filled mansion later, and she doesn’t know whether she’s made a friend or an enemy.

“I should have realized sooner what you really were,” he snarls, and even though Carver, her wonderful idiot brother, finds a sudden protective streak, the elf’s apology still sounds like it’s been dragged out with thorns.

“Can’t be helped,” she tells him lightly, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “But you wouldn’t be the first to distrust me for it.”

He frowns, staring at her, and for one wild moment she thinks of whiskey and a summer beneath a spreading oak.

All these years, and it seems she’s never made it past eighteen.

—

He has been in the city too long. Too many people know his name, his face, where he sleeps; too many people call him friend and expect his blade in their defense.

Come to the Hanged Man, she says, for cards. Have a good time. Stay a while longer.

He doubts her, but somehow—he does.

—

She drops the bottle and two heavy tumblers on the table between them and he looks up, wary but not afraid.  
  
“Fenris,” Hawke says, and she smiles.

—

“Let’s have a drink.”


	7. Then There's Tongue (F!Hawke/Fenris)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now, a series of shortfics I did for the [kiss meme](http://loquaciousquark.tumblr.com/post/57098730548/send-me-one-of-the-following-numbers-a-ship) on Tumblr.

  
w0rdinista asked: TWENTY TWO. F!HAWKE AND FENRIS. GO!  
  
—  
  
 **Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 700  
 **Prompt:** 22\. Then there's tongue--  
  
—

The thing is—

The thing _is_ , if Hawke is desperately, embarrassingly honest with herself, is that she is an idiot. She knows this. She’s very well aware of this. And yet, half-drunk on Anderfels white wine and listening to Fenris read her the latest letter from Charade, she can’t even pretend to listen to his words in the light of her abrupt obsession with Fenris’s mouth. His lips keep doing the most— _interesting_ things around his Rs, and the muscles of his neck and throat move so _nicely_ around some of his vowels, and then he reads _I hope to see Gamlen with you soon_ and the tip of his tongue flicks between his teeth just so on the _with_ , and Hawke barely tamps down her sudden urge to remind herself of _exactly_ how that tongue would feel flicking somewhere else.

"Mm," she says belatedly into an expectant pause, slumping a bit further into her armchair. "Wonderful. Go on."

Fenris lifts an eyebrow from where he sits on the sofa. “Are you listening?”

There’s that _R_ again, and those lips pursing around _you_ , and a pleasant shudder ripples down Hawke’s back as she lifts her wineglass to her mouth. “Avidly.”

"What did I say?"

She is, now that she thinks of it, perhaps a little more than half-drunk. “‘Are you listening?’ Which I am. Like I said.”

His lip curls. She loves that expression on him, loves it more when she’s been the one to cause it; Fenris’s mouth is one of his most expressive features, the twist of it or the thin-pressed lips or the slight, almost-gone curve of a smile conveying more to her than a hundred words could from someone else. And it’s not just his voice, though she loves that, too, especially when it drops low and rumbling in her chest; rather it’s the way he deliberates over every word, each syllable chosen thoughtfully and carefully over many others, as if now that he has won for himself the freedom to speak his mind he is determined not to cheapen it with thoughtless sounds.

Then Fenris says, “ _Hawke._ ”

Her eyes fall shut as a hopeless, besotted laugh slips free (appropriate, says the Aveline in her head, considering she’s doing a rather good impression of a sot at the moment), the tingling of her skin seeming to coalesce into something rather hotter at the pit of her stomach, coiling there in dark, heady promise. “I’ve been listening,” she says, hearing the words trickle out of her like wine, like honesty, and then, with only the slightest struggle to extricate herself from the armchair, she manages something like a standing position and makes her almost-steady way across the room.

Fenris rescues the wineglass from her hand—empty, she realizes, and hopes that it’s because she finished the glass rather than dribbled a trail of white wine across the carpet—and places it on the polished endtable with Charade’s letter. Then he looks up at her where she stands above him, that rare, sweet, half-smirking curve to his mouth, and Hawke touches the corner of it with clumsy fingers before she pours herself into his lap. His hands come to her waist automatically, sliding around to the curve of her spine as she settles atop him, her knees on either side of his hips, her chest against his, her mouth brushing over his wonderful smiling mouth. “I’ve been listening,” she repeats, not at all sorry for the wine she knows is on her breath, not at all hesitant as she cups that strong jaw in her hands, encouraging his lips to part just enough for her tongue to slip between them. “But,” she adds eventually, nipping his full lower lip as she draws back just enough to speak, “I can’t say I’ve heard a word.”

Fenris laughs, low and rumbling, and she grins at the eager stroke of his hands down her back. “Then allow me to repeat myself,” he murmurs, voice dropping delightfully on the last word, and proceeds to put his clever tongue to a much more satisfying use than her cousin’s letters.


	8. Underwater Kiss (F!Hawke/Fenris)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lilou88 asked you: #20 for Fenris and Hawke. :D

Lilou88 asked: #20 for Fenris and Hawke. :D

—

 **Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 600  
 **Prompt:** 20\. Author's Choice; I picked #18 - underwater kiss!

—

Fenris doesn’t remember learning to swim.

He supposes he must have, once, perhaps with his sister by his side in some warm Seheron river, the jungle-green leaves stretching broad and silent above their heads—but this is a fancy of his imagination, he knows, because those days to him are lost. Still, his muscles’ memories remain if nothing else, and as he cuts through the cool lake water with long, powerful strokes, it is with the ease of much practice and many hours spent like this.

The water is calm and clear, dark with night sky and ringed with the shadows of trees, and as he draws near the place where Hawke treads water in the center of the little lake he slows to an easier stroke, feeling the water tug and pull against his bare feet with what little current Hawke has stirred. She grins, her pale shoulders just edging out of the water, and shoves her dripping hair away from her face.

"Glad you could join me," she tells him, her voice quiet in the hush of evening breezes and the distant call of crickets.

Fenris snorts. “You said the water was warm.”

"I’m sure it’s very nice during the day."

"Of course," Fenris says, perfectly aware of her duplicity, and when she moves to float on her back he drifts beside her in content silence. Her hair spreads out behind her, a black fan drawn over the lake’s mirror of reflected, shimmering stars, and Fenris draws his fingers through the feathering ends until the heavens shiver with the motion.

Hawke laughs, softly, and turns her head to look at him. Her eyes are very bright. “You can’t get views like this on the Wounded Coast.”

"No," he agrees, watching the water lap at the bare skin of her shoulders.

After a long moment Hawke smiles, the moonlight catching only a moment on the glimpse of her teeth, and then with a quick exhaled breath she disappears beneath the surface of the lake. Fenris blinks, looking at the place where she vanished; then, as the ripples begin to settle and the stars smooth into mirrored glass, he smirks and lets out his breath, too.

The lake is dim beneath the surface, no star’s light to show him Hawke here—but Fenris needs no such luxuries, and with a moment’s thought his lyrium begins lighting, vein by vein, faint blue-white light resolving the gentle shadow before him into the softer features of Hawke’s face. Her eyes are wide at first, caught in this unexpected trap; then she _smiles_ , and draws nearer with a smooth motion, and lyrium light plays down the curve of her cheek, the rise of her breast, rippling with the motion of the water and the slow kicking of their feet.

He reaches for her, his palm alight. A silent laugh bursts free of her mouth in a cloud of a thousand tiny bubbles that flicker like white stars as they vanish upward; then her fingers are on his and between them, and her legs are tangling with his legs, and in the smooth cool glide of water her mouth glides across his own.

His eyes close despite themselves, and when she draws back it is harder than he expects to open them again. And yet somehow she is still there, caught in his arms and in the gentler grasp of the lake, and her eyes are bright with the light that flows from his skin to hers.

It’s true that Fenris does not remember learning to swim. Still—still. Like this, with the stars somewhere above him in one smooth unbroken stretch across a still, silent lake, there are some things he knows he will never forget.


	9. Goofy Kiss (F!Hawke/Fenris)

Anonymous asked you: F!Hawke/Fenris - Goofy Kiss

—

 **Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1200  
 **Prompt:** #17 - goofy kiss

—

The Champion's out in her garden again. Jule can't help but notice, can't help but pause, either, jabbing her embroidery needle through a loose bit of fabric in order to pull the curtain a little further away from the window. She's not supposed to be watching the Champion— _certainly_ not supposed to speak to her, according to her mother's frequent lectures on her general unsuitability for a young noblewoman's friendship—but the window of her little sitting room looks directly over the Champion's back garden, and despite the lectures she can't help but be fascinated by her rather unusually-titled neighbor.

"Jule," comes a voice at the door, and she drops the white-lace curtain hurriedly, plucking the needle from its home in the embroidered branches of an apple tree. Her mother takes a few steps into the room, dressed for company. "I'm going over to Charity's for lunch. Will you be all right here by yourself?"

"Of course," she says, as easily as she can. "Say hello to Elery for me."

A faint tinge of suspicion chases across her mother's face, but after a moment it gives way to a smile. "I will, dear," she tells her, and departs, and the moment she is gone Jule abandons her embroidery to the cushion beside her and looks back to the window.

The Champion is still there, kneeling on the ground beside the old stone bench half-hidden under a broad-spreading tree. It had shocked her, the first time she'd realized the woman elbow-deep in dirt was the noble Hawke everyone was so concerned with. At the time the garden had been terribly overgrown, years of neglect and misuse turning it into a massive green nest of weeds and poison ivy, the rather uncouth men who'd been in residence before her little concerned with maintenance—but then one day she'd looked down and there had been Hawke, not yet the Champion, in the most ridiculous broad-brimmed hat, a pile of weeds behind her measuring as large as the massive mabari dozing at her hip. Jule could hardly _help_ watching, really, as week by week the weeds receded, and a little path emerged, and somewhere under the ivy-choked tree a picturesque stone bench had found its way to light again.

She is not in her hat today. A shame, really—she will not be out long, then—but as Hawke sits back on her heels and scrubs her forearm across her eyes the back door opens and a voice calls out from inside. Hawke answers something—Jule can't quite understand the words through the closed window, and she isn't daring enough to open it for the sake of true eavesdropping—but a moment later, the dark, tattooed elf strides out into the garden to meet her.

Jule sucks in a breath, her cheeks coloring despite the distance and her own relative privacy. This has been an entirely different thing, watching the elf's relationship to Hawke change and strain and resolve itself over the years. She's only gotten glimpses of it from her window, the tail ends of some fights and the beginnings of others and brief, painful moments of tears and the Lady Amell holding her daughter before she died; but in the last few months something has changed between them, something very deep and very strong, and in spite of her own misgivings it makes her—happy to see them together.

The elf stands over her, lean shadow thrown across her shoulders, and asks something Jule cannot hear. Hawke nods, smiling at him over her shoulder, and that seems to be enough; the elf—Fenris, she's almost certain he's called—moves to sit on the stone bench, crossing one leg lazily at the knee, pointing at some patch of weeds in the far corner with a murmured word. That startles a sharp retort out of the Champion, but it's followed by a quick, bright laugh, and even as Jule covers her mouth to stifle her own laughter the Champion reaches over and tickles the bottom of the elf's bare foot.

He jerks away, scowling, and both Hawke and Jule snicker; then the Champion pushes to her feet and stands before the elf on the bench, her hair sticking to her cheeks, his green eyes narrowed in suspicion that is clear enough even from Jule's lofty perch. Hawke says something, bending low, and the elf answers her in kind—and then, grinning, Hawke takes his face in both dirt-stained hands, smearing earth across his cheeks and down his jaw. The elf sputters, batting at her hands, brushing at his own face ineffectually—Jule laughs again despite herself, because as terrifying as he looks when he is angry she knows he can be surprisingly fastidious about his own appearance—but before he can rid himself of either the dirt or Hawke's groping fingers the Champion pulls his mouth up to meet hers.

Jule gasps, colors, and turns away. The apple tree with its silver-needle decoration looks back at her cheerfully, entirely complacent in the afternoon sunlight; when she musters the courage to look down again, Fenris has risen from the bench, Hawke's arms twined around his shoulders, his own hands knotted between the blades of her shoulders. They are still kissing, his complaints about the dirt apparently forgotten, and continue to do so for some time—certainly longer than Jule has ever seen people kiss, _certainly_ longer than her mother would deem as anything even approaching appropriate. Still, when at last they pull apart, there is a contentment in the lines of his shoulders and the ease of his limbs that she has never seen in him before, and Jule can't help the foolish smile that spreads across her face at the sight of it. They've been unhappy together so _long_ , and it's—rather nice to see something else, even if she knows she shouldn't be watching in the first place.

The Champion reaches up, then, to brush a bit of the dirt from his cheek. She murmurs something and the elf laughs, catching her still-soiled wrists in his hands, and as they make their way together into the privacy of the Champion's home Jule allows the curtain to drop across the window again. Her embroidery still sits placidly beside her, a perfectly respectable diversion for a perfectly respectable young woman with perfectly respectable friends. It's not that she dislikes it, not really—even her mother could not have forced her to embroidery had she hated the idea—but…

But she has never smeared dirt over a lover's cheeks, and she has never been kissed like _that_.

Tomorrow, she decides, she will invite the Champion to tea. Her mother will be scandalized and her father will purse his lips and lift his eyebrows, and yet, she doesn't care. The Champion brought a bench and a path and a garden and a _home_ out of a weed-choked mess; all Jule has is an apple tree made of green thread and a silver needle, but that's more than nothing and she's eager to learn what nineteen years of respectability haven't taught her. Hawke knows; she's watched her learn it. She hopes she's smart enough to learn it, too.

Smiling, Jule plucks the apple tree from the window seat. It's just a bit of colorful thread woven through white fabric but—she's chosen her pattern to follow, here, and she thinks, somehow, it's a start.


	10. Hot, Steamy Kiss (F!Hawke/Fenris)

apocalisse asked you: Since you asked… 1, F!Hawke and Fenris :) - Hot, Steamy Kiss

—

 **Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** T  
 **Word Count:** 1200  
 **Prompt:** #1 - hot, steamy kiss  
 **Notes:** I took this completely literally and I don't even feel sorry about it; also, written under the influence of powerful painkillers, so…take it for what it is.

—

Sometimes, very rarely, when the stars are aligned just so and the wind comes north-easterly with the tiniest hint of the sea and the Maker himself drops the bare edge of a smile in her direction, Hawke catches Fenris humming in the bath.

Today, as it turns out, is one of those exceedingly rare days, because as Hawke slips into her bedroom with a glass of water in one hand and an apple between her teeth, a faint snatch of… _something_ floats through the barely-ajar door on the other side of the room. The crisp scent of her soap hangs in the air around her, and the room is heavy with heat and the dampness of open water; she places the apple and her glass on the desk as quietly as she can, delighted beyond reason, and creeps to the doorway of her bathing room on her toes.

And of course, there is Fenris in her enormous copper-and-wood tub, looking for all the world like some decadent nobleman sprawled amid his luxuries. His head leans heavily against the curved rim of the tub, his eyes closed, his face pointed to the ceiling; Hawke follows the bared lines of lyrium ribbing down his throat and chest to where they disappear beneath the steaming water, vaguely embarrassed that her breath goes so shallow at the sight of them but not embarrassed enough to turn away. One long, muscled leg stretches out before him, his bare, callused foot dangling over the tub's lip; his other leg is bent at the knee, more lyrium curving stark and white across his dark skin where it rises from the bathwater in a delicious contrast that makes her mouth go dry.

Even as she watches he hums again, slipping one hand behind his head, the lyrium over his throat just barely rippling with the sound. Water drips from his elbow, slides in rivulets down the muscles of his arm and across his chest, and it's only a few measures of a song she doesn't know but his voice is _good_ and strong and he looks utterly content amid the steam curling around his shoulders—

And the most attractive man she's ever met is lying naked in her bathtub, and Hawke will be damned before she lets an opportunity like this go to waste.

(Isabela, she thinks dazedly, will _die_ when she tells her this.)

"Knock knock," she singsongs, rapping her knuckles against the open door. "All decent in here?"

"No," Fenris says without bothering to open his eyes, but she can see a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. The room is much muggier than she'd expected, she realizes, practically a sauna between the heat and the steam and the closed windows, and in only a few moments her clothes have begun to stick to her skin.

Somehow, she doesn't care in the slightest. "My favorite way to find you," Hawke tells him, seating herself carefully on the edge of the tub. He looks at her, then, eyelids lifting just enough for slivers of green to fix to her face, and Hawke brushes a bit of damp white hair from his forehead. "I don't see how you can breathe in this. It's like a mabari's sitting on my chest, the air's so thick."

"I would have it hotter," he admits, glancing at the clear summer skies out the high window. "But this does well enough."

Hawke quirks an eyebrow and dips one hand into the water by his hip. "Say when," she says, grinning, and when he makes no objection she reaches for fire, threading heat down her arm and wrist and palm until a fresh plume of steam billows out from the water. It takes only a few seconds—though even that is long enough to nearly scald her fingers—and then Fenris lets out a long, satisfied sigh and sinks further into the water.

"Better?" she asks, shaking out her hand ruefully.

"Better," he says, and this time when he looks at her the heat from the bath has slid into his eyes, the green made darker with open suggestion. "Thank you, Hawke."

"Just don't come running to me when your flesh starts falling off your bones. That water's almost boiling."

"Heated baths were a rare privilege in Minrathous. I enjoy the…"

"Freedom?" she suggests, propping one hand on the bathtub's rim as she leans nearer.

"Indulgence," he says instead, and lifts one hand from the water to wrap it around her wrist. His hand is _hot_ , his pulse thumping hard and quick in his fingertips, and the lyrium striped across his palm tingles and pricks as the bathwater runs in warm trails across the back of her hand.

Hawke grins, shaking her head, at once amused and exasperated at the sudden racing of her heart. "If that's an invitation, I have to decline. At least for a few minutes, anyway; I've no intention of reddening up like a lobster for the sake of a quick cuddle."

Fenris laughs, the bathwater rippling with the motion, steam puffing away from his mouth in a little cloud of disturbed air. His head falls back against the bathtub's curved lip again, eyes half-closed and hooded as he watches her, and then his thumb strokes very gently and very deliberately up the inside of her wrist, and Hawke wonders if he can feel the skipping beats of her heart. "Not only that," he murmurs, that same terrible promising smile sliding across his face again.

The most attractive man she's ever met— "Damn you," Hawke says roughly, and throws her other arm to the copper edge of the tub across him in a clumsy brace as she leans down and kisses him. Fenris lifts himself to meet her, water sloshing away from his ribs as he rises, as his mouth comes hot and wet and eager against hers; one dripping hand curls around the back of her neck, steaming water trickling down her spine, into her shirt already stuck to her back with sweat and humidity. He strokes the side of her neck once, twice, and she shudders at the gentleness of it; he laughs into her mouth and she tastes his own sweat, and the tang of lyrium, and a deeper _something_ made of smoke and leather that she has always loved, cannot help but love now.

Eventually, though, he pulls away, or she does—somehow they find themselves apart, anyway, and Hawke blows out a breathless chuckle between her teeth. "You are _ridiculous_ ," she tells him, because he _is_ , this perfectly ridiculous elf soaking lazily in her bathtub in water a thousand degrees hotter than it should be, his cheeks flushed with heat and more than that, eyes smug and satisfied and dark with desire as he watches her fruitless attempts to smooth her curling hair away from her face, to pull her hopelessly damp shirt away from her chest.

"No more so than you," Fenris points out, eyebrow lifting, and raises both hands from the water to cross them behind his head. He closes his eyes. Hums a half-measure of something low and gentle.

Hawke looks at him a long moment, quietly.

Then she says, "Oh, _screw_ it," and a moment later her shirt sails off into the white-curling steam that surrounds them.

She does scald a little, just at first, but it is worth it.


	11. Forceful Kiss (F!Hawke/Fenris)

Anonymous asked you: 19, f!Hawke/Fenris – forceful kiss

—

 **Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** M  
 **Word Count:** 1500  
 **Prompt:** #19 - forceful kiss  
 **Notes:** Smut. Also, loosely inspired by real events in game. I hate to admit it, but not all of Eppie’s bad decisions are her own fault.

—

It takes all of ten seconds after the high dragon falls for Fenris's hand to close around Hawke's arm. Her head whips around at the touch and he sees challenge in her eyes, and anger too— _good,_ he thinks, furious, and does not bother to loosen his grip.

"What," he snarls, "was _that_?"

She lifts her chin without looking away, blood still seeping from the open wound across the bridge of her nose. "Isabela," she calls, her voice even, "will you and Merrill give us a minute?"

"You can't possibly be serious. There is a _high_ _dragon's_ cache somewhere around here and if you think I'm just going to let it _languish_ —"

"It'll still be there in fifteen minutes," Hawke says—snaps, really—and after a moment of surprised silence, Isabela lets out a low _ooh_ of understanding. Merrill looks between them, confusion and worry evident in her face, but Fenris jerks his head impatiently and Isabela slings her arm around Merrill's slim shoulders, leading her back up the path and out of sight.

Hawke still has not dropped her gaze. If anything she looks angrier than before, and when Fenris steps closer she jerks her arm out of his hand. "Explain yourself, Hawke," he says again, low and growling beneath the thin shreds of what control remains to him.

"There's nothing to explain," she says, anger rippling down her words. "You saw exactly what happened."

"I saw you throw yourself beneath the feet of a high dragon. I saw you ignore every thought of your own safety and the safety of those you fight with—"

"That's what I was trying to _protect!_ You saw Merrill go down—that dragon came down right on top of her and she wasn't moving—"

Fenris's lip curls, his hands fisting. "And so, like a _fool_ , you rush beneath its feet yourself."

She sucks in a harsh breath between her teeth, outrage stifling her voice. "You—how dare you. Someone had to go after her and you sure as the _Void_ weren't going to do it—and _aside_ from the fact that we needed her help to fight, Fenris, I do happen to actually care about what happens to Merrill!"

"Fine words," he snaps, stung, "but sentiment is poor armor against a dragon's talons." He can still see it in his mind's eye, playing over and over in a terrible loop; one powerful bunching of the dragon's muscled haunch and Hawke had been _gone_ , flying backwards into the sheer cliff face, her head slamming into an outcropped boulder with a sickening _crack_. She'd fallen face-first to the sand, utterly still, and for one clear silent moment he'd known—he'd _known—_

But a minute later she'd stumbled to her feet, one hand alight with healing magic pressed to her own head, and the cold knot of terror behind his heart had begun to blaze with fury.

"Considering it was your _sentiment_ for Merrill motivating me in the first place," Hawke grits out, each word clipped short, "I frankly think that's a pretty shit argument."

Fenris's lips twist, wordless in anger, and in four quick steps he has Hawke pinned against the hillock rising from the center of the clearing. Already, the sun has begun to set; the rise of earth casts them both in shadow, dimming the flash of steel on steel as Hawke wraps her gauntleted hands around his wrists. And yet—

And yet, the burning of her eyes into his has not lessened in the least.

He relishes that. Relishes too the defiant lift of her chin, the tendons pulling tight in her throat as he leans closer, crowding her, knowing he is crowding her. "You should have waited. You _know_ this."

"A minute or two—"

"—would have made no difference. _None._ The blood—Merrill was _down_. That would not have changed. A delay of even a few seconds would have permitted us to draw the beast away, and then you would have been free to heal her with no danger. Instead—" she starts to speak, eyes blazing, but Fenris overrides her without mercy, "instead you rushed in without thought and endangered yourself, and it was good fortune _alone_ that did not leave the two of us fighting a high dragon with no mage and _no healer_!"

"Why, _Fenris_ ," she says, mocking, edged, "if I didn't know better, I'd say you sounded _concerned._ "

He bares his teeth—but there is something else beneath her scorn, something open and hot with challenge. He searches her face, his grip tightening on her shoulders—and the instant he sees the tight smirk at the corner of her mouth he _knows_ , and even before she starts to yank him closer he is already crashing his mouth over hers.

It has been a long time since they've fought like this, longer still since he has felt so frantic for her touch—but his heart races in his chest, a wild thundering gallop still caught in the ice-bright terror of watching her crumple to the ground. Hawke knows it, he realizes distantly as her steel-tipped fingers scrape across his neck, knows his anger owes as much to fear as fury, and though it grates to find himself so transparent before her he is gratified to feel her own heart beating just as high and hard in her throat as his, her quick gasps into his mouth just as needy, her own hands just as eager to grasp and hold and _take_ as his own.

Hawke opens her mouth under him. He drives his tongue between her teeth, drives his thigh between her legs; she bites his lip and tightens her hand in his hair until it hurts, a glinting pain that sets him snarling. She barks a short, sharp laugh that cuts off into a gasp as he presses harder against her; then her hands are scrabbling between them and her belt is falling loose and his is too, and somehow between them both laces come undone and smalls are shoved aside and her ankles lock together at the small of his back as he pins her with his whole weight against the face of the hill behind her.

"You can be such a bastard," Hawke gasps, her teeth closing around the tip of his ear. "I _hate_ how you treat Merrill sometimes."

"And you," Fenris says into her neck just as tightly, each bite he leaves there dragging a hiss from Hawke, "are frequently careless to the point of stupidity."

"This coming from the most stubborn man in the Free Marches—"

"Justifiably so, when it comes to your inattention—"

"Don't you _dare_ talk to me about justifiability right now!"

"As you wish," he snaps, and she yanks his mouth back over her own.

They neither of them last long, not like this, not with anger still between them, not with the knowledge that Isabela and Merrill will be back too soon. Instead it is short and rough and quick, all fingernails and sharp-tipped steel, all teeth and hot gasps and kisses too hard for the word, and when Hawke throws her head against his throat and hisses out a long string of curses he is not far behind her, his grip tensing on her thighs until he knows she must bruise.

It is only after, when her breathing begins to slow, when his own heart thumps into a rhythm less desperate, that Fenris feels his anger begin to give way at last.

He pulls free, slowly, lets her down as they both wince; without speaking they find their laces and belts and shove hair from faces and straighten themselves to decency again. Fenris knows it is likely a lost cause, at least with Isabela—even from here he can see the marks on Hawke's throat, can feel the ridged scratches on his own leathers where her gauntlets had scraped down his chest—but as he glances to Hawke and finds her watching him already he can do little but sigh.

He says, awkward and stilting, "I will…with—Merrill. I will try."

The corner of Hawke's mouth quirks up. Not quite a smile, but—close enough. "I'll work on the idiotic rushing into battle, then."

"An even trade."

"In the loosest sense of the word, I suppose."

He watches her a moment more, still caught in uncertainty—but as Isabela and Merrill draw into sight on the path curving down above them, Hawke's hand slips carefully into his, her gaze level and clear.

She squeezes his fingers gently, without anger. There is still steel between them, still too many sharp points and edges to catch them both, but here, for now—he needs nothing else.


	12. Eyelid Kiss & Kiss Along the Hips (F!Hawke/Fenris)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Doubling up, here, since both of these are pretty short.

[keptonice](http://keptonice.tumblr.com) asked you: 8: Eyelid Kiss, for Fenris and fem-mage hawke

—

 **Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** K  
 **Word Count:** 500  
 **Prompt:** #8 - eyelid kiss

—

“Leave it, Hawke.”

“I will not. Even from here I can see that’s swelling, so stop struggling and just let me—oh, _Fenris_. Ouch.”

He glares up at her with one green eye, the other swelled shut beneath a massive purpling bruise. Hawke bends over him where he sits, holding his chin carefully between two fingers, turning his face from side to side in the cool dust-choked light of his mansion’s great hall. The swelling is fresh—she guesses no more than a day old—and tender, too, if his hissing breath as she touches the swollen eyelid is any indication. “Flames, Fenris. How in the world did this happen?”

“An unfortunate accident.”

“With someone’s fist?” she retorts, though she is careful to keep her grip gentle as she brushes her thumb across the rise of his cheek, his black eyebrow, the faint glow of healing magic trailing after it like water. She does not rush—any magic involving eyes is tricky, and she has little desire to risk ones so dear to her—but after a few moments the tight, hot skin begins to lose something of its angry appearance. “What a _shiner_. You could win awards for this.”

Fenris’s mouth twists. “I,” he begins, then falls silent, then tries again with a mutter, “Aveline is easily startled when she is inebriated.”

She does not laugh. She doesn’t. She _does_ pause her healing to stare very intently through his open ceiling at the bright blue square of sky beyond it, swallowing hard twice, three times. Even so, her voice is strangled. “So that’s why she—told me to stop by today.”

“Perhaps,” Fenris says sourly, and Hawke closes her eyes.

“ _Well_ ,” she says at last, as businesslike as she can be with the memory of Aveline’s vaguely embarrassed note dancing behind her eyes. “At least you can rest assured knowing she can defend herself.”

“I don’t recall that the issue was in _question_.”

“You did say she was drunk.”

He snorts, but there is little bite to it. The swelling has almost entirely receded under her hand; a breath more of magic and even the discolored bruise is nearly gone, blood seeping back where it belongs, leaving this eye as whole and healthy as the other. Hawke lets out a breath, dropping her hand to cup his cheek; then, with a grin, she bends and presses her lips gently to his eyelid. “There,” she tells him. “All better.”

Fenris blinks up at her as he straightens, hand coming up to touch his now-healed skin. “That was—quicker than I expected.”

She taps her own eye. “I had a lot of practice growing up. Carver was never one to pull his punches.”

“Ah. I am…unsurprised.”

“And healed,” she adds, “which is more to the point.”

And if she gets a bit lost in green as he stands, smiling, to kiss her, it’s only a healer’s duty, after all.

 

* * *

 

[emmahasaface](http://emmahasaface.tumblr.com) asked you: F!Hawks and Fenris #14 : )  - kiss along the hips

—

 **Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** K  
 **Word Count:** 550  
 **Prompt:** #14 - kiss along the hips

—

The first time Hawke sees for herself the full extent of Fenris’s markings, she barely notices them. They are both desperate and hurried and entirely focused on other things, and by the time she manages both the concentration and slowing heart for something more thorough, he is up and dressed and going, going, half-gone already.

Then somehow a year is gone with him, and two, and three, and lines she’d barely mapped to begin with vanish from her mind with them. Oh, there are some she remembers—the curves on his upper arms and the bars striping down his throat she thinks she will know until she dies—but the rest…the rest blurs, and fades, dimming vein by vein until she thinks it might have been a dream after all.

But abruptly—three years _ends,_ and exile ends with it, and though the first hours of their reunion are nearly as frantic as the ones that sent them spinning apart in the first place, afterwards, _after—_

After, Hawke stretches out beside him on his bed, studying without the slightest compunction the sated, sweating elf sprawled on his back beside her. A bit of white hair has stuck to his brow above his closed eyes; Hawke brushes it free, gratified when he neither flinches nor pulls away, laying bare the three dots of lyrium marking the center of his forehead.

She pauses without meaning to, stroking her thumb across the markings there in as open an affection as she dares. When Fenris does not object she grows bolder, tracing down the lines of his straight nose, his full mouth, winding down the lyrium that trails over his chin, his throat, the long curling bars across his chest.

“You are staring,” he murmurs without moving.

 “With good reason.”

One green eye cracks at that, the faintest mark of confusion furrowing between his brows. “You have seen this before.”

“Not,” Hawke says, splaying her hand across the flat muscles of his stomach, across the lyrium stretching there, “ _nearly_ enough.”

He lifts an eyebrow—but cedes her the exploration, leaning back against his pillow, eyes half-lidded as he watches her slide her fingers over his ribs. His stomach jumps and twitches under her fingertips, making her laugh, but her amusement dims as she follows the lyrium down past his navel to the sharper curling fishhook just inside the bone of his hip. She does not say _this must have hurt so badly_ , and he does not tell her _it did_.

Still, she cannot keep the gentleness from the motion as she bends to brush her mouth along the skin there, tasting sweat, feeling the whisper of fine, soft hair against her lips. Fenris draws in a silent breath that lifts against her mouth; when he breathes her name in a husky murmur she only grins, bringing her fingers up to join her lips, feathering her way down the lines and dots and whorls of lyrium that lead her somewhere rather more interesting.

“Unless you’d rather I not,” she offers, startled at her own boldness, but the quick tangling of his fingers in her hair tell her otherwise, and without another moment of hesitation between them, Hawke sets about the pleasurable business of turning the lyrium’s old memories into something better for them both.


	13. Neck Kiss (Isabela/Fenris)

[rubyvroom](http://rubyvroom.tumblr.com) asked you: Fenris/Isabela, 20, if you don’t mind?

—

 **Characters/Pairing:** Isabela/Fenris  
 **Rating:** T  
 **Word Count:** 1600  
 **Prompt:** #20 - author's choice  
 **Notes:** Oh man, I enjoyed this so much. I picked “neck kiss” ostensibly, though it kind of grew a little larger than I expected. Anyway, I _really_ hope you like this; I had a ton of fun writing it, and I’m so glad you gave me the opportunity to write a different ship.

—

Isabela wears her jewelry like armor, gold and bronze and brass at her throat, in her mouth, where she is soft.

Fenris does not know this, not at first, not the first time. The first time he is half-drunk on death and she is freedom incarnate, and despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that he considers her a _friend_ he finds himself at her door, at midnight, at something of a loss with this freedom he has won. And yet—and yet, he is certain she knows where he should start.

If she is surprised to see him, she doesn’t show it. Fenris doesn’t know if it’s because he’s that predictable or if she simply knows him that well; regardless, Isabela fists a hand in his collar and lets loose a smooth hot promise of a laugh that makes his mouth go dry and his feet nearly stumble as he follows her into the dark. Her boots stay on, that night, along with her bandanna and her necklace and the brassy discs at her ears. Next time—

There will be a next time. That is the start.

—

The next time is not long after that, and the time after that even sooner. Isabela cares nothing for his inexperience, as he’d both feared and hoped; rather, she laughs and slides her dark, sea-weathered hand across his stomach, and whispers _all the better to keep you from bad habits._ Still, Fenris finds himself an eager pupil and Isabela a very willing teacher, and between the two of them he learns how to make her gasp, and laugh, and clutch at his shoulders; she teaches him a better way to use his tongue than shouting, and another purpose for lyrium Danarius certainly did not intend, and that pain has no place in a bed unless both parties wish it. They are only little things to learn, he thinks, only small truths he should have known before—but Isabela drops them into his hands one by one, carelessly, endlessly, baubles of gold and silver from the vast rich stores of a pirate queen given freely and without price.

Sometimes he stays; sometimes he does not. Isabela keeps other lovers occasionally—Fenris does not begrudge her that, because he knows as well as she does the sea loves many—but he cannot deny that on the quiet nights, when it is only her body and his and no sound between them save the glide of skin on skin and soft breaths like the murmur of waves, there is something in his heart that stops its wounded beat, nears somehow closer to—peace.

He watches her eyes, those nights, turned to him like brass burning in the dark, and wishes he could read their heat.

—

One morning, when the sun is bright and hot and Isabela’s little room is overwarm with Kirkwall’s summer, Fenris lies on her bed and watches her dress. It is not until she tugs up her boots that he realizes how much he cherishes the long bare muscles of her legs, not until she brushes her hair in the mirror that he realizes how infrequently he has seen her without gold at her throat, at her ears, at her lip.

Isabela is not a woman willing to be cherished—he knows _that,_ if nothing else—but he asks her about the jewelry nonetheless, his voice still low and rumbling with sleep, curiosity victor over comfortable silence.

Isabela looks at him in the mirror, her black, perfect eyebrow lifting, her kiss-reddened lips curving into a smile as beautiful and devastating as a storm. “Ask me again sometime,” she purrs, rising from the vanity, sashaying out of the room into the brighter daylight of the Hanged Man proper.

Fenris rolls to his back, throws his arm across his eyes. Lyrium tugs at his skin, faintly, a suggestion and a reminder; a small smile slips across his own mouth, and he says to the empty room, “I will.”

—

He does, some weeks later, when they are at last through with the Coast and he can barely breathe through the heavy weight of salt air sitting thick in his chest. Not with words, not exactly—rather, he reaches up and touches her face as she bends over him, a touch of neither lust nor simple friendship, and as she stills to something guarded and impenetrable he lets his fingers slide to one ear. Her hair is dark and heavy against his skin, still smelling of sea salt—but she does not move away as he brushes it to the side, does not flinch as he finds the little hook that holds her earring in place.

He pulls it free. She lets him.

The other comes after, two bright etched-brass coins almost as bright as her eyes in the dark. He puts them to the side, not forgotten but not—needed, not now, and when Isabela bends closer to kiss him there is something new in this touch that she has not yet taught him.

He learns, though. He does not forget.

—

Fenris keeps this lesson over the next days, and weeks, and months. The earrings come off nearly every time, whether it is by her hand or his; he knows human ears have little of an elf’s sensitivity in them, but he enjoys the flesh of her earlobe between his teeth, the heady noises she makes as he puts his mouth to skin beneath them and sucks there. She pays back the favor as often as not—though he suspects, sometimes, she enjoys too much the sight of him shuddering beneath her mouth—and when one day he catches her tongue working at her own lower lip, he is not entirely surprised to see the small gold stud slide free, into his waiting palm.

It is only a little thing, only a little ball of metal and gilt and a long straight post to fix it. Isabela glances at it against his callused skin, against the lyrium striping across his palm beneath it, then looks at him with brows raised as if to say: _so what now?_

He smiles, and puts it with the earrings, and they both pretend they cannot feel his heart thudding fast and hard in his throat.

—

The necklace, then, is the last to go, the final piece of armor shed like so many errant leaves in autumn. Fenris unclasps it himself, one evening, when the moon is full and clear and more than enough to light Isabela’s little room, when she comes to him without a word, naked save this last bit of gold, and turns, and sighs, and pulls her hair from the nape of her neck. It spills over her hands like water, tangling around her fingers; he wishes he had that excuse for the sudden clumsiness of his hands as he reaches up for the tiny clasps holding the pieces together. The first one is harder than he expects for something so small and delicate—Isabela snorts a quip about men and women’s smallclothes and he cannot help but laugh—but it comes free eventually, as they all do, as surely as the chains she’d taught him to snap inside his heart, and the gold and brass and bronze clink softly against themselves as he drops the necklace to the bed.

He stands there for a long moment, his fingers tracing over the bumps of her spine, the smooth dark curving skin so much softer than his own; then, when he feels her shoulders lift with a slow breath, he bends his head and presses his mouth to her neck.

It is not the most heated kiss he has ever given her; neither is it the most passionate.

It _is_ the most intimate. And as her hand comes up slow and sure to slip into his hair, to hold him where he stands against her, his arms slide around her shoulders in nothing less than an embrace. And it _is_ an embrace, because he wishes to embrace her, because Isabela has taught him that not all cages are prisons and not all yield means restraint.

His mouth moves, from her neck to her ear to her throat. She lets him, her head tipping back to bare herself to him; then she turns and puts one hand on his chest with her eyes like burnished brass and in one deft motion pins him to the bed beneath her.

She does not release him until dawn. Even then, he does not go.

—

Isabela wears jewelry like armor. Each piece is a shield, a guard, a bright distraction from the tender parts of her they hide—but Fenris knows what lies beneath them, now, knows too that armor has its place in battle and in their bed and even between them, occasionally, when teeth and tongue wound more than heal. There’s death between them, too, and behind them, quiet fights and bruised places marked by more than accident; and yet they’re caught in freedom all the same, because no bars can hold a ghost and no lock can stop a thief, and if somehow they’ve tangled themselves into each other it’s only two halves of the same coin coming home again.

“What do you think?” Isabela asks him one evening, bare feet on the table, half-empty bottle of rum dangling from one hand. “A ship, white sails, and the sea?”

“Only with the right captain,” Fenris says, and she laughs as she looks to him, her eyes shining like gold.


	14. Fever Dreams and Lullabies (F!Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 3,800  
 **Prompt:** from [gamern7](http://gamern7.tumblr.com/): f!Hawke/Fenris - fever dreams and lullabies  
 **Notes:** A re-imagining of the conversation after Feynriel's Night Terror quest. I was never quite satisfied by the dialogue presented in game, and this prompt finally gave me the chance to explore that scene a little more.

—

Magic is a curse. Fenris has known this from the first moment of his waking memory; it is as deep in him as his name, as the cold burn of lyrium, and he knows, he knows, he _knows_ that those who wield it may never be trusted. Never. Not when they walk so thinly-veiled to demon and temptation alike—not when their minds might be turned by a word to the whim of another.

Slave, says Wryme, clawed hands outstretched, open. Here is power to equal the magisters. Here is strength beyond minding. Here is life without fear.

Impossible. No demon could promise—and yet the boy Feynriel’s mind is a fantastic place, wild with power, and even he, no mage, can sense the thrumming of an open promise in the air between them. Danarius is strong. This creature is strong, too.

He _wants—_

_A moment of your time, nothing more._

Hawke is still smiling when he turns on her.

—

The next moments come in vivid, silent images, impossible, like the too-bright dreams of illness and high fever. His hand, tense on the hilt, blade half-raised between them; Hawke’s smile frozen behind blank shock. The quicksilver flash of lyrium, sharpened with Fade. False air thick in his lungs—false stone beneath his feet.

The moment of resistance before his sword-edge slides between her ribs. Her gasp of pain, her stagger, her false blood blooming wetly and too red where he has struck her. He does not—want—

He needs strength. Wryme’s voice—no, his own, a soft song. She demands everything from him and gives nothing. She will keep him weak. She is one of _them._

But to kill a mage in the Fade—to kill Hawke—

Then, pale, her eyes shuttered and cold, Hawke lifts her hand against him, and the pyre she makes of herself burns his doubts to ash.

—

(Somewhere, a woman is singing. It’s low and simple and wordless and—sad, somehow, and worn thin with the weariness of grief. She sits—somewhere, and her face is turned from him, but he knows her.

A girl leans against her knee, her hair red and braided over one shoulder. Her shoulders are bent. He does not move, but—all at once she turns to him, startled and not afraid, and when she lifts her chin the woman’s song falters into silence.

The girl stands, her eyes blazing. She says—)

—

Fenris wakes, choking, a name behind his eyes and a shout tangled in the back of his throat. He can still feel the blistering heat of Hawke’s magic on his palms, the tops of his feet; his teeth ache with cold. A woman’s voice sounds to his right, aged and accented, and _Marethari_ pushes out the other name, the one he almost knows, and for a moment he can’t breathe beneath the crush of rage and sorrow. Then the other memories come, resolving along with the beams of Arianni’s roof into pristine focus: Wryme crooning in his ear; his blade, bloodstained beneath his heavy grip; Hawke’s lips twisted around a word. His name—

_Fenris._

His curse explodes into the air. The low conversation in the other room falls silent, but Fenris is beyond caring; he shoves to his feet from the cheap pallet and curses again, viciously, fists clenched against his own impotence. How many words had bought him? Ten? Twenty? A lullaby of a promise and he’d sold his soul to a _demon_ ; a half-minute of his own hypocrisy and Hawke’s smile, so familiar, had died—

He stops. Dread lurches cold and heavy in the pit of his stomach and he whirls from the lined face appearing in the doorway to the other pallets, arrayed like graves on the worn wooden floor of Arianni’s home. Anders, breathing lightly, eyes closed—Aveline—his own empty place—and—

He cannot tell. There are rumors even in the Imperium of mages slain in dreams, of the empty shells that had awoken instead, and his heart pounds and he cannot breathe and he _cannot tell_. Hawke’s eyes move behind her lids, her breathing steady, and she looks no paler than she should—but for a moment there are two of her, his mind pulling the constant traitor of his memory to the forefront, smearing blood across her ribs where she lies, her arm, her nose, breaking her left hand, bruising the bone of her right ankle.

His throat closes. Fenris covers his eyes with one hand, appalled. He is going to be—sick—

“What has happened?” says Marethari, sudden enough to shake him, and when Fenris looks again the image is gone.

“I,” he starts, then tries, “Hawke—“ and when that too throttles him he swears again, tightly, and turns on his heel. “It has not gone well.” A colossal understatement. Too unguarded, all the same.

Arianni appears in the doorway behind the Keeper, her eyes pinched in worry. “And Feynriel?”

“He lives,” Fenris says shortly, and turns to the one narrow, cracked window that looks out to the vhenadahl. _For now_ , he wishes to add, but there are three bodies on the floor behind him and he has no wish to tempt fate, even if his own temptation has ruined—everything. His chest _aches_.

A gasp breaks the air before Arianni can speak again, and all three of them turn in time to see Aveline jerk up from her pallet, her spine bending like a drawn bow. Fenris steps closer, hand outstretched, but her eyes are wide and unseeing and bruised against her whitened cheeks; then all at once they grow damp at the corners, and the stalwart captain buries her face in both hands and curls forward, against her knees, shuddering.

“Damn,” she says, low and muffled through her fingers. “Damn. _Damn_ it.”

“Aveline,” Fenris says too roughly, and she flinches for the briefest instant before allowing her hands to fall away.  She drags in a breath, lifts her chin—hard eyes, and red hair, and for a moment he can _almost—_ and then she meets his look and the recognition of that helpless fury stifles the rest. He says, not a question, “You as well.”

“Yes.” A pause; then, both proud and ashamed: “Wesley.”

“And—the others?”

“Anders is still with her.”

Of course. The abomination. And here he is, stranded on the Veil’s wrong side, three years and more of his place at Hawke’s side stripped back like so much birch-bark before his own inability to master himself. How fitting that the only soul left to guard her has already been won by a demon. Fenris grits his teeth. “And the boy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then we must wait,” Marethari murmurs, and Arianni closes her eyes.

Fenris looks at Hawke, at the still shape of her face, at her chest rising with each breath. Alive. Alive, for now.

(His weight on the hilt of his sword, locked against her staff, overpowering her with sheer strength until fire blooms between her fingers like an unfurling sun.)

He turns away.

—

A sudden sharp breath cuts through the quiet, waiting room, and Hawke wakes. Anders is just behind her, the easy rhythms of their sleeping breaths cut short and shallow; Fenris’s own stops high in his throat, tangled in fear. Hawke blinks, slow and dazed, and reaches for something he cannot see—and then her brow furrows and her mouth twists in something almost a smile, and as she pushes to a seated position and glances to Anders, Fenris cannot manage the relief that sweeps through him at her expression.

Not Tranquil. Not Tranquil, not because of him.

And then the relief gives way to _fury_ , because fury is safe now that she is safe, because the rest is too tender and too dangerous yet for him to face head-on.

She knew the risks. She knew his own hatred and disgust for magic and took him to its heart, blithely, and thrust him who has no practice with demons at their feet. She should have known. _He_ should have known.

His fault, and she is just as much to blame.

Hawke stands. She speaks to Arianni of her son and the woman weeps and embraces Hawke as Marethari looks on. Fenris glowers at the back of her head, knowing himself more angry than there is cause for, knowing all the same that this wound between them will not heal without a fight.

Hawke looks at him once as they leave the woman’s shack, and then her gaze skitters away to Aveline, to Anders, to safety.

Good, Fenris thinks, and clenches his fists.

This is not over.

—

 (He cannot shake the memory of the woman’s song. It loops over and over behind his thoughts, unending, a few simple phrases and words he cannot understand. A girl, he thinks, with green eyes and red hair…)

—

Hawke does not come to him for some time. It must be that way and not the other, though he would prefer to finish this fight without lingering. He cannot go to her home where she is master; he who has no power over his own mind would have even less in her dominion. (Not that he is master here. Not that he owns any part of this place save what he has brought to it.)

Still. He wishes she would come—and fears it, and seethes at his own uncertainty. Brooding, he supposes Varric would say, if the dwarf were here, but he has not seen Varric since before this fool’s errand to the Fade, and he finds his fury simmering again at the thought that Hawke had not thought to choose the dwarf over him—had not thought to choose _anyone_ who might have been better suited _._ There is something hidden beneath that, though, something small and proud and terribly ashamed, but he has neither the desire nor the strength to delve into it now. Not yet. Not—not yet.

Not until he knows if he has ended more things than his own illusions.

And then Hawke arrives at last, her shoulders thrown back and her jaw set, and anticipation shudders lazily down his spine. He is already pacing upstairs when her footsteps sounds on the upper level; he glares when she appears in the door and she rolls her eyes, dropping her staff too hard against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Hawke,” he says flatly.

“Fenris,” she says in the same manner, and leans against the doorframe. “Shall I yield the opening volley to you? You look much more…hm. Incensed.”

“Stop.”

“Irked, then. Irritated.”

His lip curls. “This is not a game. If you will not be serious, _go_.”

Hawke lets out a short, impatient sigh and pushes away from the door, crossing to where he stands before the hearth with short steps that click on the stone. “Of course it’s a game, Fenris,” she snaps. “It always is. You stew and simmer and froth and make everything ten times more complicated than it has to be, and then I come over and you shout for a while until we’re friends again.”

Friends—

_You think this slave would choose you over his freedom?_

Fenris turns away, into the more familiar refuge of bitterness. “Just go, Hawke.”

“Really? That’s how you want to leave things?” An exasperated snort. “So much for all their talk of olive branches.”

 _Meddlers._ “I did not ask you to come here.”

“You are more stubborn than Carver sometimes, I swear by the Maker.”

He cannot stop his flinch at that. Too much real anger there, and anger at _him_ —and frustration surges in his own heart, hot and sudden enough to spark his tamped rage into life again. _You fear them still_. _You fear them—you fear—_

Fenris swipes his arm through the memories, whirling on his heel as if that might put the demon’s voice at his back, behind him, where his shadow might still the song’s echo. Worse, too, that even now he wishes— “This,” he snarls, “is _your fault._ ”

“Of course it is,” Hawke says, though her lip curls. “It was the first thing I did this morning when I got up. I thought to myself, ‘what could possibly be better than fighting one of my closest friends to the death in the middle of someone else’s Fade-dream?’”

“You knew I had no wish to go. You knew I did not—that I would not be—“

Safe. Careful enough. Strong enough.

The irritation in Hawke’s eyes vanishes behind a more dangerous opaqueness. Fenris is not so versed in her expressions to know its meaning, despite the few uncertain flirtations they have shared. He knows her teasing, and he knows her anger, but _this_ —he does not know this, and it unsettles him to realize that the skills he has honed through a decade of service to another master have failed him so completely in this place. Uncertainty is death for a slave; he has watched that truth bear out too often to doubt it now.

_They’ve left their marks on your body and your mind._

“Yes,” Hawke says at last, and her voice is as impossible to read as her face. “I thought you’d refuse the offer.”

“And Aveline as well.”

“Yes.”

Too weak to stop the sneer. “Only a fool surrounds herself with traitors.”

A quick step forward, almost enough to mask the recoil. “A fool strong enough to best you.”

“With aid.”

“Which you slaughtered with the first blow.”

Aveline had not even had time to draw her sword. “Enough time for you to gain distance.”

Hawke turns her head as if he has struck her, though her eyes do not drop away. “You’re too fast. I knew you’d be on me in a heartbeat.”

“You were quick enough to turn your magic against me.”

“I was afraid of dying.”

The surface is matter-of-fact, but Fenris can hear the strain of old fear beneath it. _Of Tranquility_. His own fear is a stone in his throat, thick with the memory of Hawke, asleep, too still; it chokes and angers him at once and he clenches his fists. “And so easily you made me your enemy.”

“You sure as the Void weren’t acting like my _friend_!”

“As though bringing the unwilling to the Fade to save that _dreamer_ is friendship!”

“You could have said no!”

Fenris snarls, wordless with fury. It is an unfair accusation and Hawke knows it, _knows_ that despite the distance of years his instincts are not easily given to denying a mage’s request. _Hawke’s_ request.

He is so _weak._

Hawke lifts her chin. “Would you have killed me?”

_With my aid, you could be free forever._

Fenris’s chest hollows. He says, steadily, “Yes.”

There is a long silence. Hawke looses a breath, silent and without movement, and then she turns and takes two quick steps until she reaches his open window, hands planted flat on the sill, her eyes lowered to the street beneath her. The sky is clear today, blue and distant, and for a moment her hands are caught to the wrists in sunlight; then they curl into fists, and her head drops with a soft laugh that holds nothing of amusement. “I thought so,” she says, and sighs. “At least I knew you well enough to tell _that_.”

A bitter snort. “Not well enough to expect the betrayal.”

“I think,” Hawke says slowly, still without looking at him, “that I’d forgotten what the Fade does to normal people. Who aren’t mages, I mean.”

“A careless thing to forget.”

Hawke cuts her eyes at him, sunlight flashing down her cheek. “A careless thing to open your soul to the first one you meet, too.”

And yet she’s here all the same, no weapon drawn, no fear in her face. Fenris says, “You should not have come here alone.”

“Shouldn’t trust you, you mean.”

Fenris strides across the room, swift and silent and wholly predatory; Hawke holds her ground, gaze level, but at the last moment before his palm flies up to strike the stone wall by her shoulder she flinches and he sees in her face—

Fear.

“ _You are a fool_ ,” Fenris snarls, hating himself, close enough to feel her heat against his chest, close enough that her shift of weight brushes her knee against his own.

Hawke shoves him. Not enough to hurt—but more than sufficient to break his balance under the shock, and he stumbles back a step as she shoves his chest a second time. “Bastard,” Hawke snaps, reaching as if to push him again before folding her arms tightly over her chest. “That was so—so _cheap_ , Fenris. A cheap, dirty, underhanded trick, and if you try to use that as some twisted justification as to how our friendship has been ruined forever I swear to _Andraste_ I’ll—burn every pair of pants you own to cinders.”

Fenris sucks in a breath. “What?”

A sharp, narrow fingers jabs into his breastbone. “Startling me and then being offended that I’m startled is _not_ a reasonable justification for breaking this—” her hands open between them, mute with frustration, “ _whatever_ this is. It’s petty and stupid and you’re far too intelligent to resort to something so childish.”

_Ha! How transparent can you get?_

“Childish,” he says, and snorts. “This, from you?”

“I never claimed I wasn’t a hypocrite.”

“No,” Fenris agrees, and the stark affront on her face startles a laugh from him. It is harder than it should be, and rougher, but it is a laugh nonetheless, and when Hawke’s mock pique gives way to a smile something knotted in the air between them begins to loosen. A child calls out in the street below and Hawke looks over her shoulder; Fenris follows her gaze until the child runs out of sight, until Hawke sighs and drops her eyes and faces him again.

 “May I—“ she says, “can I ask—why you said yes?”

Simple enough. Shame enough, too, to bury what is left of him so deep he cannot claw his way free. _You could have power enough to challenge any who would chain you._

_Come here, my little wolf._

He takes a breath, looks away from the window. The words are not there, not to answer her in the way she should be answered; instead he clenches his fists and closes his eyes, and when he at last finds the spine of a free man he turns his head just enough that she may understand him, not enough to meet her gaze, to meet the challenge in her face. He says, faltering, “The demon’s oath. Would it…have held to it?”

Silence. Long enough for heat to flush his neck, long enough for his back to ache with how stiffly he holds himself. “Maybe,” Hawke says at last, her voice level.

“What would have been the cost?” An academic inquiry.

“Your mind. Your body, maybe.” He hears her shrug. “You’re not a mage, so I’m not sure if you would have…” she pauses, and he can tell she is searching for the right word, “twisted into the sort of abomination you and I know. But a pact with a demon never leaves the mortal soul unchanged. It might have given you power, yes. Maybe even enough to rival the magisters, like it promised. But, Fenris,” she adds, and suddenly her hand is on his arm and she is circling him, holding his wrist, holding his eyes, brow creased with something more than concern. “You would not have been the same again, after.”

He is not the same now. “An abomination.”

“Anders,” she agrees, her fingers falling away from his wrist. “Maybe worse. Justice at least began life with noble intentions.”

“Noble.”

“For certain definitions, I suppose,” she says, though the pointed lift of her eyebrow is enough of a reminder of his own hypocrisy to stop him.

Fenris strides into the middle of the room, away from daylight, hands hanging aimlessly at his sides. Without looking back, he says, “You resist them every night.”

“I try. Some nights are harder than others.”

“What tempts you?”

The moment the words leave his mouth he knows it is a question he has no right to ask, far too intrusive even before he damaged this thing between them. His voice hangs in the air anyway. He does not try to withdraw it.

Eventually, Hawke lets out a low breath behind him, as if recovering from an unexpected blow. She says, “Bethany, mostly. My father.”

“Your family.”

“Yes.”

Flatly: “I have no family.”

(A girl with green eyes and red hair, and a woman, sitting, humming, a snatch of song that he almost—remembers—)

“Not blood, maybe,” Hawke says, and the lullaby fades. “There’s other things tying people together than that.”

“Dreams,” Fenris says drily, the last wisps of song vanishing into nothing as he turns to face her. “Nothing real.”

“Speak for yourself. My dreams are vivid enough.”

“Oh?” Fenris says, curious at the thread of something else in her voice; Hawke glances at him and then away to the window, and the sunlight slides a broad-gold finger down her coloring throat. Perhaps—he is not sure, but perhaps—

_What would you want from me?_

“Anyway,” says Hawke, leaning her weight forward on her hands, “I just came to…make sure we were all right, I guess. Hash things out. Make sure we were on the same page.” She looks over her shoulder, winking. “Two peas from the same pod.”

“Not for an apology?”

“Aveline gave me one already. Why? Are you offering?”

Hawke at the end of his blade, eyes blank, fingers alight in flame; Hawke asleep on the pallet in Arianni’s home, breathing shallowly enough to frighten him; Hawke beside him, in his home, smile on her face, expectance in her eyes.

He says, “Perhaps.”

“And the concession at last! How did that feel coming out? Like sand?”

He purses his lips. “Hawke.”

She laughs. “Fine. I don’t want to be peas with you anyway. Sourpuss.”

“ _Hawke,_ ” Fenris says, amused despite himself, joining her at the window despite the weight of his own remaining reservations. “If nothing else, no demon could endure your sense of humor.”

“Flatterer.” Hawke thumps him gently on his arm, no violence in the motion, no threat. No fear, either, and as his shoulder brushes hers he feels the slow siphoning withdrawal of another voice, only memory, too smooth and sinuous and slick with promises. He does not need Wryme now; he does not fear it, either. The woman’s song he wishes for, and for the name of a girl with red hair, but it is in the way he wishes for many things: distantly and without the expectation of fulfillment. He would like to know them. One day. Another day.

_A moment of your time, nothing more._

This moment might have been lost, had he triumphed. Had Hawke not been the stronger.

He is glad she was.

“So,” Hawke says, grinning as she looks out to the sunlit street before them, as she nudges him with her elbow in the way that only precedes her worst jokes. “Peas, Fenris?”

“Peace, Hawke,” Fenris says, and smiles.

At least, for them—it is close enough.

—

end.


	15. Just Another Soul for Sale (Isabela, Hawke, Anders)

**Characters/Pairing:** complicated F!Hawke/Isabela, unhealthy F!Hawke/Anders  
 **Rating:** T  
 **Word Count:** 1500  
 **Prompt:** from anonymous: F!Hawke/Isabela, Just another soul for sale?  
 **Notes:** Unhappiness all around, featuring Jade’s Thistle Hawke and all the difficulties entangled therein.  
 **Warnings:** Character death.

**Soundtrack:** [Hurt by 2CELLOS](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozNEdMcWZvQ)

—

All souls have a price.

It’s one of the first lessons Isabela learns. She’s seen men sold for sword and coin and other things, promises that don’t shine in the dark so much as thump with the clasping of gloved hands. She herself goes for little more than a song and someone else’s faith, sanctified by the cool jingle of silver pieces. Nothing more cruel, she thinks, and buys herself back with a blade and a word and a ship. Nothing more simple.

All souls have a price. Hers is simply smaller than others.

—

Isabela loves the ocean. It’s cold and wild and honest in a way that little is in the world now, and if a summer storm swallows down her ship and men alike Isabela…can’t begrudge it. The ocean sets a high price for its freedom and no sailor sets to sea without knowing it, without realizing that one red-dawned day she will call the cost home again. Straightforward, though. A clear bargain; a choice without coercion.

How fortunate the ocean cares nothing for names. She chooses a new one, with a new course and a new sky to cover it, and wonders if there’s gold enough in the world to buy the soaring of her soul as the waves break white stars at her feet.

Convenient, really, that a grave for so many should feel so close to _home_.

—

Hawke, Isabela thinks, startled, is like the ocean. It’s only a fleeting thought, only a moment in the first night of their meeting—but when Hayder’s dead on the floor and the earth itself shakes under her feet with the force of unfettered magic and Hawke turns to her and _looks_ —there’s a storm in her eyes as dangerous as any Isabela’s ever sailed through, and she doesn’t even think Hawke knows it. That one will drown worlds; that one will rise and rise and rise without an ebb tide, and when she is through with this city there will be nothing left but bones and the eyeless fish of the deep places, all light burned away.

Isabela grins, puts her hands on her hips, saunters close enough to smell lightning.

She’s always loved storms on the sea.

—

One by one Hawke buys souls for her collection: an amulet for an elf girl, protection for a slave, a midnight meeting and a broken heart for an apostate with old maps. They go to the Deep Roads and Hawke’s brother falls from grace to grave, and the tides rise higher behind Hawke’s eyes. Anders offers a high price, a bitter cup and an early death, but a brother’s soul is—worth much, even here, and when Carver goes into the dark Isabela knows it’s not the first time Hawke’s paid a price too dear, and it won’t be the last.

Not that Hawke’s heart breaks. Not that the tide ebbs, or the storm wanes—no. Instead it only freezes over, thin glass preserving in frost the heart Hawke had before it was sold in sorrow, before it was bought by blood. Isabela wants to smash it open, to see the way Hawke looks when grief and anger are pried away—but she can’t cheat the hand when she’s not sure of the game, and instead she only waits, and wonders, and watches the weak places grow ever smaller in the thickening ice.

—

For a long time Isabela thinks Hawke is different. Not just from her, but from everyone—from all the petty souls that trade in lives and livestock and concern themselves more with coin than with _people_. Hawke is hardly the type to keep such small concerns, not with the city tearing itself to pieces over the placid qunari, and anyway, she’s never been the type of woman to have the _patience_ for such things. A snap and a glare and men fall away before her; Isabela can’t imagine her counting bronze pieces in the light of a dim candle until the wick burns to ash.

Isabela likes that.

Likes Hawke, too, despite the sting of her nettles, and tells her so, one evening in her mansion, furnished as sparely as she. Hawke smiles. Hawke _blushes_ , just the faintest bit, just the barest coloring at her cheeks and at her throat, and when Isabela hooks a finger in her robe and pulls her closer Hawke lets out a queer little laugh and—bends forward to meet her.

She didn’t know Hawke could bend. She didn’t know Hawke could laugh like that, either, and for a long time that night she makes it her personal mission to drag as much of both from her as she can. It’s a good night. It’s a really _good_ night, and then morning comes, and—

_You’re not thinking of bringing feelings into this, are you?_

_Of course not_.

Of course not—and they never once mention the lie.

—

She understands, after that. Understands that just because Hawke’s not like other people doesn’t mean she doesn’t lie to herself all the same, doesn’t lie to her friends and the Viscount and Meredith and Orsino and the whole damned city falling at her feet. It might not be coin—but Hawke’s a peddler of souls all the same, buying them for her own purposes and selling them when she’s finished, not out of cruelty but cold pragmatism, out of need, out of the eyes of someone standing high and distant from her charges.

She’s not the kind of woman to have friends. She tells Isabela this, one night, not drunk but not— _sober_. Fenris is a blade, useful and skilled and coolly disinterested in anything more than that. Aveline has known her too long and knows better; Merrill is too dangerous to trust. Varric can’t find the angle to sell, and Hawke’s not interested in being sold—irony of ironies, Isabela thinks, and says nothing—and Anders—

And Anders is in love with a woman, and Hawke is a storm on the sea.

—

Anders moves out of Darktown. It’s a sudden thing, surprising even Hawke, but there’s no room in either of them for second guesses and if they doubt, neither of them mention it to Isabela.

It doesn’t really— _bother_ her, not in the way an arrow in her arm might bother her, but _she_ at least is used to the old ache of bruises that don’t heal well, and Hawke is a wound old enough to have scarred twice over. Isabela doesn’t regret things, not her choices or her lovers or her own hurt, and she doesn’t once begrudge either of them what they’ve chosen to make of themselves.

Still.

Still, she watches Hawke pull Anders in under her wings, not to protect but to watch and guard and jess and smother, because Hawke trusts no one and hawk’s eyes are sharp enough to see danger from a thousand feet. Anders is _dangerous_ , and hurt, and Hawke is dangerous and hurt and Isabela is the closest thing to a friend either of them has left, even if it’s not a thing she’s meant for. She tries to listen, when she can, and she visits Anders and goes to the Coast with Hawke and tells bawdy jokes and slings her arms over their shoulders like they’re happy.

But in the end she’s not a healer, and some wounds cost too much to close.

—

Every soul has a price. Anders sells his in drakestone and sela petrae. Hawke buys it back with a narrow blade between his ribs, and when his dying is done she straightens and lifts her chin and looks to the city spread out before her, kneeling at her feet, begging for her help and panting for her blood. Lightning bursts in the sky, in her eyes, dangerous and cold and brilliant, and Isabela knows enough of storms to realize this wind is too wild and hard to follow for much longer, not if she doesn’t want to break her mast before it.

And as for Hawke—

And as for Hawke, as much as it’s supposedly for the sake of the city and what’s left of her family, both Hawke’s and Isabela’s families vanished long ago, and all that remains is bone and ash. Seven years and the city’s found the cost of Hawke’s soul at last: a throne and a crown as hard as she is, as unyielding in purpose and as coldly certain.

A soft, embarrassed laugh, and a smile, and a blush, once—

But the price is too high to allow such things to live, not when Hawke’s helped set it according to the impossible standard of her own convictions. Meredith’s stone idol cracks and bursts; the tide swells; a newer idol, living, immaculate, takes her place. So Isabela fights and kills and wipes blood from her face for the last time, and when it’s finished she flips a grin at Hawke and turns away, out of the lightning’s path. She hasn’t got a ship—or a crew, for that matter—but that’s all right. She’s survived before. Will again.

Every soul has a price. Not all of them are bought with coin. Not all of them are worth the paying.

—

She would have liked—

No regrets.


	16. AU Meme: In Space (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 950  
 **Prompt:** from [faejilly](http://faejilly.tumblr.com/): your OTP in space  
 **Notes:** So apparently "space" has irreversibly become “Mass Effect” in my head.

—

God, but it’s a beautiful ship.

Nothing big, not the most expensive ship she’s ever seen—but _fast_ , and sleek and beautiful and perfect and _hers,_ even if Isabela had to help get her the registry in the first place and Varric’s broker fee had nearly cost her the last of her credits. And broken, at the moment, which is why she’s in a helmet and hardsuit, floating in a black sea of stars, not a sound but her own breathing in her ears and the faint crackling hiss of comlinks.

“Wrap it up, sweet thing,” Isabela drawls, and Hawke snaps the last panel into place over the now-repaired communication array. “I’m _dying_ of boredom here.”

“You could have done it yourself,” Hawke suggests, flipping out the solder iron of her omnitool. “It’d be more exciting than just sitting in the cockpit twiddling your thumbs.”

“If you think that’s what I’m twiddling, you don’t know me very well.”

Hawke laughs, face-shield darkening as sparks spray weightless and gold around her, reflected off the mirrored black hull. “Almost done. Tell Sebastian to prep the airlock, will you?”

“Copy. See you soon, Hawke.”

The last seal darkens and cools, and when Hawke is satisfied that the panel will hold she lets her omnitool go dim. It takes a moment for her face-shield to adjust; then, slowly, the stars rise again from the emptiness, one by one, until there is no space between them for the light.

“Beautiful,” she says to no one, and pushes away from the ship. The umbilical is woven steel and long enough she can move freely via the mass effect generators on her heels, and as she makes her way along the hull towards the airlock she lets herself drift, still as silence, caught in the grip of the stars.

Then—light, behind her, gold and not stars, and she glances over her shoulder to see she has reached the crew quarters without realizing it. And this particular window—she laughs, the sound tinny and too loud inside her helmet— _Fenris’s_ quarters. Of course.

His room is cluttered, his small worktable covered edge to edge with half-finished mods and blade attachments for his shotgun. His own armor is on the wall, ablative ceramic glinting in the light of his lone lamp, the carefully-articulated gauntlets smaller without his hands in them.

With a sudden burst of cooler light, the door to his room opens. Her mind provides the familiar pneumatic hiss and in walks Fenris himself, shirtless, a towel draped over his damp hair, long white tattoos made whiter by the dark expanse of naked skin. Hawke laughs again and turns full face to the window as Fenris crosses to the shelf above his bunk, scrubbing the towel over his neck absently as he runs his finger along the books’ spines there. His lips move faintly with the titles.

He pulls one free at last. A burst from her heels and she drifts closer to the window, close enough to read the title—asari poetry—close enough that she can touch the reinforced silica-fiber plastic.

So she does.

He startles at the rap, his tattoos lighting a biotic blue for a split-second before he sees her at the window. His lip curls and Hawke grins, clearing her face-shield further until he can see her expression; at her gesture he comes to the window and crosses his arms over his chest, book still dangling from one hand.

“Nice shower?” she mouths.

Fenris rolls his eyes as he answers. _It was fine. Are you all right?_

A drop of water trails down his temple, vanishing briefly under his jaw before sliding down the line of his throat. It is harder than Hawke expects to look to his eyes again, harder still when she sees his faint smirk. “We’re—almost done. Lonely?”

_I have this book._

She does a little shimmy, graceless hips made more so with the clack of armor and no gravity to keep her grounded. “Sounds thrilling.”

_Better than mission reports._

“Too bad you have the only copy on board. I’ll have to take your word for it.”

He uncrosses his arms, leaning forward until his knuckles rest on the window’s sill, his damp hair just touching the clear plastic. His smirk is wide enough now that Hawke can feel it to her toes, a floating that has absolutely nothing to do with the cloud of white stars behind her, reflected in the window around Fenris’s head. He reaches for the slim band of his omnitool beside him; then his voice fills her helmet, deep and rich enough to drown in even through the comlink distortion. “Perhaps you might prefer to read it for yourself.”

“Fifteen minutes,” she says, pretense gone, and leans forward until her helmet knocks gently against the glass where his hair brushes. Not quite a kiss; close enough for now. “Ten, if you don’t make me hack your lock again.”

“If you would bother to memorize the code, you would have less trouble.”

“I would if you’d stop changing it every two weeks.”

He laughs and her stomach flips, and then again when his mouth softens into the smile Fenris so rarely shows her. Then he touches his omnitool without looking away, and the console at his door flickers from orange to green. “Ten minutes, Hawke,” he says.   

Hawke grins, touching the glass briefly over his cheek; then she turns and grips the steel-woven cord that holds her home, the thrusters in her boots firing, silent and sure, until she soars into the stars.


	17. AU Meme: Jane Austen (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1025  
 **Prompt:** from [w0rdinista](http://w0rdinista.tumblr.com/): "Fenris/Hawke: Austen AU. >;D"  
 **Notes:** None.

\--

“Forgive me,” said she, “but I must believe I have mis-heard you. Am I to understand that you have made me a proposal?”

His features flickered with surprise; he said, “Just so.”

“Excuse me. I meant to give you the opportunity to demur. I will not believe you to be serious in making me an offer of marriage.”

Abruptly, he rose to his feet. “This is your refusal?”

“You have given me every reason to refuse you.”

Fenris crossed to the fireplace with quick steps, agitation in every movement. She was not used to seeing him any less than composed; it gratified and embarrassed her at once, but did not sway her. At length he turned to her and said, “Will you tell me what you mean? or does it please your vanity to keep me in ignorance?”

At once she saw that he believed _himself_ to be the injured party, and her pity fled her heart. “You cannot be serious, sir.”

“You mock me.”

“You know what I am. You know the family from which I come. You have expressed to me at every opportunity your dislike for my magic, your total disgust with the tools that run in my family’s blood. At every meeting since my childhood I have endured the looks of our neighbors and acquaintances for what we cannot help; then, sir, you came with your friends and your horses and your fine carriages, and gave their prejudice every weight that money and power can bestow, without regard for those who must suffer beneath it. You have made us an object of sport for the small-minded. I could have borne that— _you_ know that I love to laugh—but these are only the slights to _me_ , and it is the others you have injured that keep me from accepting you—indeed, would have even if I did not know your heart turned so kindly to me in spite of myself _._ ”

His color had risen as she spoke; now it rose further. “I do not know what you mean.”

“You know I speak of Bethany. You have separated my sister from her happiness, perhaps without the possibility of mending. You have separated a good man from a good woman in wilful disregard of their own feelings, in favor of _yours_ , of your own dislike. You cannot pretend you do not know what I mean.”

“My objections to your family carry the same weight for my friend. Vael would not have made an offer to her without my approval.”

“And Bethany is to have no feelings in this?” She knew her tone past civil, but surprise had stolen her equanimity. “You have ruined her in the eyes of all our friends. She has been exposed for their judgment and condemnation, and your friend whom you claim to love so dearly has been laid out a flirt.”

“She showed him no favor that I could see. There was no sign of affection on her part that I might believe to be sincere.”

“And because _you_ could not see it, there was nothing there? I have shared a bed with my sister since the week she was born and _I_ do not always know her heart. Bethany has hidden her magic all of her life for fear of the shame she might bring to our family with its misuse. She is not like _me_ , who might carry such humiliation on my own and be merry despite it; she has always felt such things strongly, and worried for us when we would not worry for ourselves, and taken more on herself than she ought. You have hurt the best and kindest woman I have known, sir, and were that your only fault it would have been enough.”

The curious lines that marked his throat moved as he swallowed. His unrest had spread to his fingers; they clenched and unclenched rapidly as he turned to the unlit hearth. “Your list of my faults is very long.”

Hawke could not keep her countenance. “Even could I ignore such a thing, your character has shown itself in every way. I have heard of your dealings with Anders; I have known how you took what living he ought to have had and sent him adrift in the world, no friend to help him, solely because of his magic.”

“Anders!” said he contemptuously. “He would be gratified by your concern.”

“Who could hear his troubles and _not_ feel concern? Except you, who ridicule him for suffering the very misfortunes you have laid upon him!”

Fenris shook his head, amazement on his face. “You would believe me more a monster than a man. Perhaps if I had come to you as he had, with simpering smiles and magic and a story to grieve you, I might have received another answer.”

She stood, stung. “It is your arrogance, sir, which condemns you. Not the pride that you spoke of so eloquently in your friend’s home; I speak of that disdain that I hear every moment you speak of mages, of those like my family, your eagerness to believe the worst of me without cause and without proof. I mean your conceit and your willingness to make decisions for others without regard for their own hearts. I mean the sense of your own superiority that has led you to believe that because _you_ have deigned to chuse me, _I_ should be grateful to accept you.”

He looked perfectly astonished; she lifted her chin and said, clearly: “I will not marry you, sir.”

His color had gone from red to white; now his face tightened, and she began to believe he might really be hurt before it smoothed again to the straighter expression she knew so well. “I understand you perfectly,” he said, every composure in his voice, and made an elegant bow. “Give my regards to Mrs. Hendyr. I will take no more of your time.”

He exited with quick steps, and the moment she heard the front door close behind him, she fled out the back gate to the garden and, sensing a real weakness for her own tears, set the poplar tree afire instead.

 


	18. AU Meme: Zombie Apocalypse (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** M  
 **Word Count:** 1300  
 **Prompt:** from [theirinliestheproblem](http://theirinliestheproblem.tumblr.com/): "Fenris/FHawke zombie apocalypse (the walking dead, if you're familiar with it)"  
 **Notes:** Didn't know The Walking Dead, but I can totally do zombies.

\--

“I used to be clean,” Hawke says meditatively, her chair teetering on two legs as she stares at the scorch-marked ceiling. “I have a very distinct memory of having no dirt on me at all. More than once! More than once in the same _week_ , even.”

Fenris, perched on the apartment’s narrow windowsill, smirks without looking away from the street below. His grease-stained fingers twist a cloth around the barrel of his shotgun with the ease of long practice. “An unlikely fantasy.”

“Don’t you remember any nice things from before the Blight?”

Now his smile slips. “Very little.”

“Come on, you can think of something. I know it wasn’t all agonizing experimentation and sterile white lab rooms.”

He cuts an annoyed glance at her, but she can see the reluctant humor beneath it. “I…enjoyed the sea. The Adriatic.”

“Pft. You would.”

“You…” Fenris starts, glancing out to the empty street again. His cheeks show faint color. “You would enjoy it as well, I think.”

The front two feet of her chair thump to the floor again. “I’d like to see it sometime. If it’s still there.”

“The Blight could hardly have changed so much in three years.”

“You’d be surprised,” Hawke mutters, and that’s when the dog starts snarling.

Fenris snaps the barrel of his shotgun closed again, smile gone. Toby gets to his feet, hackles a mile high, teeth bared as he stares at the door; Hawke slings her bag over her shoulder and palms one of the little glass jars she keeps on the side beside her handgun, ignoring the clatter of the chair overturning behind her. They’ve only been here a few days, but if—

The door explodes inward.

Fenris gets the first two darkspawn with one shot. Hawke takes the next one with the .45 as Toby bowls over the slender man with no lower jaw, the snap of mabari teeth loud as a gunshot itself in the tiny room. By then Hawke has the jar lit and she lets out a piercing whistle; Toby abandons the mangled mess between his feet and bounds towards her, muzzle stained red and flashing redder as the Molotov cocktail strikes the apartment’s door behind him.

“God—“ Hawke chokes, and throws out her hands against the blast. _Huge_ and twice as hot as normal, fire roaring across the splintered wood of the walls and door like a starving creature. She must have mixed it too strong—the ‘spawn are _screaming_ —

“ _Hawke_!” Fenris shouts behind her, and she whirls to see him already out the window, hand outstretched for hers. Toby has already vanished down the rickety fire escape; Hawke shoves her handgun in the back of her jeans and sprints after them both, planting one hand on the sill and vaulting over the broken radiator. Fenris’s hand presses on her back as they race down the narrow stairs, pushing her as fast as she can go, faster as flame begins to lick out the open window above them. He crowds her against the wall once when the gas stove explodes glass and steel into open air, drops of blood and flame alike lighting the shoulders of his leather jacket; when it is over they move again, the last few flights of the fire escape shaking wildly beneath them as they join a panting Toby on the street.

The dead do not follow. Not this time.

“I don’t understand,” Hawke says, adrenaline shaking her fingers as she rakes her hand through her hair, staring upward at the ruin of their temporary shelter. “I’ve never seen them so high in a building before.”

“A feeding frenzy,” Fenris suggests, scanning the silent street as they begin to head away from the ruined apartment building. A few blood-marked ‘spawn rummaging through a dumpster in the distance—nothing dangerous. Yet. “If someone died low, and the scent carried…”

“Not my favorite way to start my day,” Hawke says flatly. Her heart will not slow; every inch of her skin is tingling. She says, her voice trembling, “Fenris—“

He glances over his shoulder. She does not know her expression, but something in his eyes catches fire, grows dark and hot as if she’d broken a dozen Molotovs inside him—

They fuck in a narrow alley behind a burnt-out bookstore. It’s hard and fast and rough as the brick wall behind her, and when it ends Fenris bites her shoulder and Hawke muffles her shouts in her own wrist. He does not immediately let her down; instead he kisses her, again and again and again, all the things he won’t say— _can_ _’_ _t_ say—caught up in his mouth on hers, in his hands in her hair. His jacket bunches and slides under her fingers; her hair snags on the brick and she closes her eyes, shutting out the strip of smog-grey sky capping the alley, the cheerful green lettering on the battered door opposite that reads BIANCA’S – EMPLOYEES ONLY. Just Fenris’s hands, his calluses, the taste of his sweat and the thicker tang of lyrium that keeps him safe from the Blight.

Three years since the first ‘spawn appeared in the south. Two since Lothering burned; just over one since the night Fenris introduced himself in the middle of the night by nearly shooting her in the heart.

Stupid, really. To fall in love in the middle of the apocalypse.

Eventually Toby whines from the mouth of the alley, and after a long, calming breath for them both Fenris sets her on her feet at last. The butt of .45 has bruised her spine; his boots are caked with dirt and week-old blood and worse. They’re both sweaty messes and streaked with soot, and she is so idiotically happy she can’t bear it.

"Come on," she tells him, grabbing her bag as they both straighten themselves again to decency, as he adjusts his shotgun for easier reach. "Anders wanted to meet with us at Isabela’s place, anyway. Something about another breakthrough in his cure research."

Fenris scowls without heat, passing a hand over Toby’s head as they reach the alley’s entrance again, scanning left and right before stepping out into the street proper. “His _research_ is more likely to destroy the world than save it.”

"Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe we _need_ to start over as a species.”

Fenris stops in the middle of the street to look at her. The dumpster at the end of the road is empty now; the apartment window eight stories up where they took refuge the last few days is a charred hole, broken glass glittering on the sill and the asphalt below. Toby lets out a low whine, and Fenris says, “You sound like him.”

Hawke meets his eyes. “You know I don’t mean that.”

A burst of gunfire goes off in the distance and glass breaks, the sound almost enough to mask Fenris’s soft sigh. Hawke comes closer with a rueful smile, wrapping her free hand around his. He sighs again, his eyes flicking up to hers through his too-long white hair; Hawke bumps her shoulder against him and says, quietly, “Fenris. I would live a hundred years with this Blight if it meant I got to spend them with you.”

He shakes his head; his fingers tighten around her own. “Anders could never be so patient.”

"Probably not."

"I…would say the same to you, Hawke."

She smiles, and kisses him, and when Toby barks and bounds forward they set off behind him down the forgotten, nameless street, shotgun over his shoulder, Molotov cocktails on her hip, and their fingers linked between them.


	19. AU Meme: Riddlemaster of Hed (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1600  
 **Prompt:** from anonymous: "Fenris/Hawke, Riddlemaster of Hed AU."  
 **Notes:** The Riddlemaster trilogy, by Patricia McKillip, is my favorite book series of all time, and oh, God, I loved writing this. It’s nothing to the original, but sinking back into that place even for a few minutes is one of the most wonderful things in the world.

 **Soundtrack:**[Healing Katniss](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5kfPFBRy6M), from the Hunger Games OST. 

—

Three years after Fenris went into the heart of the Fading Mountain and did not return, a wolf fled south through Arlathan.

He barely knew his shape. His mind burned with darkness, with the unhinged terror of flight without purpose; his veins burned with the fire of the mountain’s deep and dayless ore. Trees flew by him in the night, great black hands that reached through the snow for his heart, as if it had not been torn from him in Isig.

A halla lifted its head behind a tree, a crown of gold antlers glittering in the cold light of the stars. Fenris shied from her, blindly drawing silence from a forest that had known a hundred years of it; the purple eyes turned to him and passed over him, and when Marethari had gone again in shadow he crept forward from the trees’ shelter, continued south.

Fear caught him like a swollen tide. The snow pitted silently beneath his feet; wind crept in his wake and turned even those signs of his passing into nothing. Isig had held no answers, not to his past, not to a single riddle in the locked spell-books of Cumberland’s Circle; instead in the Golden City there sat a magister on the Maker’s throne, the gold tarnished dark where his hands rested, where his velvet robes embroidered with the sun fell across the uncut jewels in its face.

Memory rose like a toothed thing, made of darkness and of fire, and of pain, and Fenris shuddered.

He ran through the night. Arlathan’s forests yielded to its plains, where it was harder to keep the wolf’s shape. Ice bled his toes and fatigue beat at him like the winds of Isig Pass, but he did not dare rest. A magister held the seat of the Maker’s power, in the Maker’s city. Shapechangers walked the world in the forms of men, with the minds of things that were not men, that were as ancient and terrible as fire, as the sea. Power had been stripped from him and given him back again in a twisted mockery of strength, as if Danarius had known that to strike him deepest would take no more than the wrenching loose of his name.

His forefeet splashed suddenly into water, and the shock tore him from the wolf-shape into his own. Fenris staggered forward, two steps, three, his skin alight from throat to heel with naked fire, burning all the greater for the ice-water that eddied at his ankles.

He had reached the Hunterhorn. He could not see its breadth in the dark; he cursed and ran his fingers wildly through his hair, turning behind him to the starlit plains, returning to pace the river he did not dare cross in the dead of night. He covered his face with his hands—and stopped, arrested once more by the silver lines that striped his palms, that ran the length of each finger to his wrists, to his shoulders, across his chest. Power thrummed in them, sealed with Danarius’s name. Bound to him even now, even here, in the lands where the roots of the Dales stretched deeper than memory into the earth.

Betrayed at the door to the Golden City, his sister’s eyes a falcon’s eyes, hooded and impenetrable as Danarius had stretched out his hand and smiled…

He could not risk a fire. He reached wearily for the wolf-shape and had no strength for it; wind howled across the empty plain as if in sorrow, and loneliness, and grief of one make with his. It carried with it a name he had not allowed himself in three years, and a memory of laughter that cut keener than the cold.

Beyond caring, Fenris sank himself into the snow and slept.

—

He woke in the hour after dawn wrapped in furs. At first he thought he had taken the wolf-shape again in his dreams; then he felt the cured hide against his cheek, and the softness of rabbit-pelt beneath his fingers, and his heart jumped with fear.

A woman sat beside him, arms wrapped around her knees. Her hair was dark, bound in a loose braid that even now held flakes of snow in its weaving. Her cloak was dark, too, thick wool clasped over her heart with a silver griffon its only decoration. She sat on an edge of his borrowed furs; when he rose she looked to him without speaking, her eyes more lined than he remembered, her mouth more marked with too many sleepless nights. Her eyes, blue and brighter than the sky, held him fixed to the earth like an arrow.

With a voice three years hoarse, he said, “Hawke.”

Her mouth tightened and he realized at once he was not dreaming, that Danarius had not conjured this image from the lightless hole of the Maker’s mountain. His hands trembled and he gripped the furs, abruptly cold; Hawke said, “I looked for you.”

Her voice struck him like a blow. She stood and his chest ached with the cracking of stone; she turned to survey the broad grey ribbon of the Hunterhorn as it hurried past, ice chipping its surface like glass, and he struggled to his knees. “ _Hawke_.”

“They said you went to the Fading Mountain. They said you went with your sister, and you were betrayed, and I have spent three years grieving for you only to be called from my bed in the middle of the night by winds, carrying your face and your hair gone white and a wolf’s heart, and a glimpse of markings I can’t begin to understand.”

“The Maker is gone.” Perhaps this was yet a dream. “A magister holds power in the Golden City without challenger.”

She looked at him and his heart leapt, even with an expression in her eyes that he could no longer read. “He held you.”

“Yes.”

“For three years.”

“Yes.”

“Three _damned_ years,” she said, her voice breaking, and when she reached for him he saw tied at her wrist the favor he had once claimed as his own.

Her hands were cold. Her mouth was cold too, and her cheeks, and though his arms tightened around her shoulders it could not check her trembling. “I looked for you. For three years. I took shapes no daughter of Ferelden was meant to know; I went to the wastes. I learned fire. And the sea, I learned that too. I asked the Dales for help, and Orzammar, and the islanders in the east. No one knew where you were. I was halfway to the Fading Mountain to demand an answer from the Maker himself when winter came, and not even that would have stopped me if the winds had not brought me your face last night.”

Overwhelmed, Fenris buried his face in her neck. Three years had robbed him of his speech; this robbed him of his mind, leaving him no thought but the wild piercing ache of twinned grief and joy, their edges bright as any blade and driven deeper in his heart. He held her closer; roughly he said, “Forgive me. I did not wish to go.”

“I _mourned_ you,” she whispered, and he felt her tears seep hot into his hair. “Fenris, where were you?”

Slowly, stilting, he told her. She touched the lines that glinted silver in the sunlight thrown back from the snow; she hissed like oil in flame at the empty City, at the magister who sat on its throne and smiled even in the dark. He showed her the wolf-shape; she shaped fire from the glinting of ice and cupped it in her hands, a white-hot flame that warmed and did not burn.

“Lothering cannot hold me any longer,” she told him, sorrow shot through her pride.

He nosed her fingers with the wolf’s nose, curling them around the fire until it died; he took his own shape again on the white plains and spread his scarred palms before her, a yielding and a plea. “I went to the Fading Mountain to find my sister and my name. Three years have gone, and I have returned to you with less even than that.”

Her breath caught. Light shook from her hands into her eyes as she reached for his face; a blade of fire touched his mouth. “You returned _to me_ ,” she whispered, holding him, rooting him deep in truth. “You think I need anything more?”

Fenris shuddered, a quick thing like the shiver of a horse’s withers. The Hunterhorn slid placidly behind Hawke, caught in dawn-light; at his back the plains of Arlathan stretched north, unbroken fields of snow like a painter’s brush beneath the sharp blue of the sky. Pine trees speared upward in the distance, marking the edge of the Planasene Forest, and Fenris startled at his sudden longing for the city he knew lay tucked beyond it, for the wide green-glass gleaming of the Waking Sea.

He took the wolf-shape. The river glittered in his eyes, cold and crisp and _clean_ , and Hawke laughed at his eagerness. He shook himself again at the sound, past joy, snow dusting from his fur in a cloud; then a hawk shot skyward with a piercing cry, its wings spread in a scarlet slash. He snarled in reply and Hawke shrieked again, fiercer than the first, and when she arrowed south he followed, the silent snow-bound fields eaten by her flight, by his feet, no sound in his ears but the wild strong beating of the wolf’s heart.


	20. AU Meme: Sherlock Holmes (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1750  
 **Prompt:** from [belannadelrey](http://belannadelrey.tumblr.com): fenris/hawke as crime-fighting investigators ala holmes and watson   
  


**Notes:** Probably one of my favorites out of the whole meme.

—

I MET THE MAN who would become my partner on Saturday, the 18th of April, in an alley off Low Street, where I kept my small apartment. I had been at the milliner’s the whole morning, accompanying a friend of mine who was overfond of hats. When at last her purchases were made and the receipts signed it was well after noon, and I, aggravated by the length of the visit and the increasing reminders of my rather light breakfast, hurried from the shop into the street without looking.

I collided with a stranger. We were both knocked to the ground; he sprang up first, face like thunder, until he saw me at his feet, and extended a reluctant hand to assist me to mine.

“Apologies,” he said in a low, rich voice, though the effect was lessened by his annoyance. He was not tall, his hair gone white before his age, his hat jammed low over his eyes. His coat was well-made but worn thin at the elbows and the wrists; his boots seemed more suited to a field than the city. His wrist bore a queer silver mark that vanished beneath his glove before I could make it out.

“I ought to have watched myself,” I replied, curious at his haste. Isabela had joined me by now; she dusted my skirts, then smiled charmingly at the stranger, who looked surprised at her attention.

“You seem lost, sweet. I don’t suppose you need directions?”

“No,” he said curtly, and with a glance over his shoulder and a short bow to my companion and me, he hurried away.

Isabela linked her arm with mine and led me the other direction, where we intended to take a brief dinner at DeSoto. “A handsome pet, that one,” said she, laughing, “a little lamb in a top-hat.”

I smiled and did not answer. I could not share her mirth; for an instant when we had struck, before recognition had settled upon him, I had seen in his green eyes a look of nothing less than mortal fear.

—

I returned to my rooms in Low Street just after two o’clock, where my uncle met me at the door. He was a man perpetually unhappy and pleased to be so, and though I believe he really loved my mother she had made him bitter with her elopement, and that left a longstanding, affectionate sort of animosity between us.

“Visitor,” he said, scowling, and jerked his head towards the sitting-room. “Man. Refused to leave, though I told ‘im you were out. He’s been quiet, if shabby enough he’d do better at the old place.” He pursed his lips. “I thought you’d finally managed to improve your lot of clients.”

“Oh,” said I, “never so, with you here to average out the whole.”

My uncle frowned and stomped out behind me to smoke, and, after Orana had helped me off with my coat and hat and I had straightened my hair in the hall mirror, I went to the sitting-room to see to my guest. I heard the voice before I saw him, a hot, familiar mutter that rankled with agitation as he apparently worked to convince himself of something. The language seemed to be Italian, and as I rounded the door, shock arrested me not two steps into the room.

“You!” I cried, astonished.

The stranger from the street looked up from the gingham sofa. His eyes were wild; his cheeks paled and then flushed, and he rose abruptly to his feet, his hat clenched in his hand. “Have you followed me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“ _Accidenti!_ Why are you here?”

“These rooms are mine.”

“Yours!”

“Euphemia Hawke, sir, at your service.” I nodded to the door. “Perhaps you missed the placard on the gate…?”

“I came here in search of help.”

“My primary profession, as it so happens.”

He cut his hand across the air impatiently. “You cannot do what I require.”

That stung my pride, for I had gone to great trouble over the years to securely establish my professional reputation. I had begun with nothing in the poorest district of the city. Now, after scores of sleepless nights and more than one evening spent in the company of Inspector Hendyr—on both sides of her prison bars, for Aveline loved nothing so much as order, and woe betide those who disturbed it even in pursuit of true criminals—I had created at last for my family a respectable living. My mother had been installed in a very well-fitted apartment on High Street, and returned to the society she loved so well; my sister lived with her and worked occasionally at a nursery as she wished; my brother had gone into the service after the second year, furious at first at my perceived interference with his commission, but the last years had mended much between us and we kept a regular correspondence.

All of this, I thought angrily, from a dilapidated tenement and a handful of pounds from a questionable moneylender.

The stranger had taken a wary step back, perhaps perceiving my irritation. “Sir,” said I, with great sarcasm, “far be it from me to detain you from any flight you may deem necessary. I understand completely. You have come here out of your way, presumably on the recommendation of another, or perhaps on word of my own reputation (which is, frankly, deserved); and although I have failed to meet your invisible standards of whatever small task you may need accomplished, I pray that the visit has not inconvenienced you irreparably. I invite you to stay for tea; or, if you prefer,” I added with a grand gesture, “I will accompany you to the door.”

His breath came hard, and I quickly perceived that whatever issue had brought him to my door, it was no trifling matter. He said a few words in Italian I will not translate here, and then he said, “You are very sure of your own abilities.”

“History has taught me to be so.”

“I have no proof save another’s word that you are as capable as you claim. This is a matter of life and death.”

“Whose?”

“ _Mine_ ,” he said quietly, and it seemed to me that a hundred years of suffering fit into that word.

My anger dissolved, and I felt once again that familiar regret caused by my own temper. “Excuse me. I should not have spoken to you so heatedly. Still,” I added, and crossed closer to him, “I would have you understand, sir, that I am the best this city has to offer you, and should you choose to engage my services I will not fail to aid you to the best of my ability. I will not promise miracles. But you have taken the trouble to come here in spite of your own misgivings, and I am willing to help you, and if you would tell me your story I believe I would be grateful, and not only for my employment.”

The stranger stood very still for several minutes. He studied me as intently as my old school-teachers when I had been misbehaving, but I could not read the look in his eyes. His brow was creased with concern and, I thought, weariness, and for some time I thought he might still take his leave of me without another word.

It is curious to think, now, what might have happened to us both if he had indeed walked away. At the time I had no hint that this man would soon become not only my most interesting client, but my most cherished; I could not have fathomed that in less than a year, I would come to love him as I loved few people on earth. Nor could I have foreseen how our unpleasant meeting would have turned to a rough acquaintanceship, and then camaraderie, and then a real and lasting friendship as we searched together for the man who had marked the silver lines into his skin.

He would tell me later that he felt as if he walked upon a knife’s edge, as if one wrong step might cast him back into the torment he had so recently escaped. Astounding, to think that all our present happiness depended so heavily on this one moment! and the both of us unaware of its great significance.

(Fenris has looked over my shoulder at my last few lines. He disapproves, for he says such things should not be made ready for the public eye; I have told him that he may choose what to include the day he decides to epistle it himself, and he has stalked away in disgust. Varric, my editor, tells me often that I ought to afford _him_ the same privilege, but I have read his prose in the _Times_ and he often makes me out either a nitwit or a holy saint, neither of which fits well with my character.  Rather, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.)

But we did not know then what the coming months would bring. Then, I had a stranger in my sitting-room and the lovely thought of a month’s wages, and when he shifted his feet I said, “Sir, will you allow me to help you?”

He frowned, but there was resignation in his face, and at last, he sighed. “I am being hunted,” said he, though the words seemed difficult to force as quick-sand, “and the men who follow do not care whether or not I survive the hunting. Will you help me?”

“Yes,” I said.

He set his hat upon the sideboard and extended his hand to me; then, he smiled. I have seen that expression on his face many times since that afternoon on Low Street. It is not common to his character, but the rarity has only increased its value, and for every frown and every scowl there are two or three moments the more precious for knowing his smile has been behind it.

—Forgive me. I have strayed from my original purpose. But this case introduced me to the man I love, and of all the intrigue and violence and death that followed this introduction, it is this moment I best remember. Of all my cases this brought me the most sorrow and the most joy; and of all his smiles, this one was my most cherished, for it was the first.

 


	21. AU Meme: Denerim (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1050  
 **Prompt:** from [vylits](http://vylits.tumblr.com/): 1. Female Hawke/Fenris 2. Hawke never goes to the Free Marches but ends up in Denerim with her family where she meets an elf on the run.

**Notes:** This will probably make more sense if you've read gaider's [short story about fenris](http://na.llnet.bioware.cdn.ea.com/u/f/eagames/bioware/dragonage2/assets/content/world/short_stories/fenris.pdf)

it still might not make sense, but hey, _i_ laughed while i was writing it. extra thanks to w0rdinista for the quick glance-over!

—

If she didn't have such a weakness for bread, she'd never have noticed a thing. But she does, and her mother's made a fresh loaf—with _nuts_ in, just the way she likes it—and even though Denerim doesn't sleep she still finds herself holding her breath as she creeps bare-footed to the kitchen, avoiding the boards that creak, stifling her exhausted laughter in her wrist. Like a child instead of a full-grown woman, she thinks, tugging her oversized nightshirt off the nail it's snagged on, sneaking like this through her own house in the middle of the night.

But— _there_. Wrapped in paper, only two slices missing from dinner. A precious bounty, especially considering the price of good flour in the markets, but Mother had promised it for her nameday and it's on the shelf _—right there—_

She's barely got one hand on it when the window rattles behind her. Half-expecting another rat, she turns—and there's an elf in the room.

"Oh," says Hawke, and blinks. Blinks again.

Still there. Rising from his crouch now, naked greatsword in one hand taking most of her attention, though somewhere behind the giddy disbelief she notes white hair, light armor, white-lined tattoos. It's a very large greatsword, she tells herself. A very strange elf holding a _very_ large greatsword in her kitchen. Perfectly reasonable to feel a modicum of concern.

His eyes dart to hers as he straightens at last. Green, and the barest glimpse of something—hunted—and then his gaze flickers down her nightshirt and he _smirks,_ and somehow between her certainty even now that he's an apparition and the sheer shock rooting her to the rough-sanded kitchen floor she can't make herself _move._ She just— _stares_ as he trots forward, still smirking, reaching to the counter behind her—

It's not until something crashes violently in the street that she realizes what he's done. He's already around the corner into the front room; she races after him, high indignation boiling her blood, and not even the sound of banging at the front door is enough to keep her from leaping onto the elf's shoulders.

"You give that _back_!" she shouts, reaching over him for the loaf of bread in his free hand as he staggers to the door. Still warm—she can smell it! Her nameday bread! "Mine!"

"Get off!" he snarls, trying to shake her off without losing his grip on either loaf or sword. "Woman—they're coming!"

"You don't give me that back and I'll kill you _myself_!"

"You don't understand—"

"I understand that you're a _thief_ , you bloody little _bastard_ —"

" _Venhedis_ ," he snaps, hands stretched ludicrously into the air out of her reach, and the front door explodes off its hinges.

They both go flying. Hawke lands first, hard, just before the chair with the broken foot; the elf barely misses crushing her, the fingers of his steel gauntlet scoring white lines into the wooden floor. He's up again in a heartbeat, scrambling for his dropped sword; Hawke, dazed, takes a moment longer, and by the time she's to her knees and the room's stopped spinning the elf is standing in front of her, blade in hand, shoulders tense and hunched as he stares down the man in her doorway.

She doesn't recognize the livery, the maroon cloak falling heavy velvet around his shoulders, the gold pin at his throat beneath the scar—but she's fled enough templars to know the shadowed smile behind his eyes means precious little good for either of them.

The fact that her nameday bread lies crumbled beneath the man's rivet-studded boot, however, is what guarantees his immediate and painful death.

"Who is that?" she asks, her voice low. The elf edges a half-step back towards her and says nothing; then the tramp of feet, and two soldiers enter from the kitchen, another from the street behind the man in the maroon cloak. There's a glimmer of movement in the hall—she glances over just in time to see Carver's back vanish into the shadows again, shepherding their mother away from the fight. _Thank you, Carver._

The man speaks. " _Avanna_ , Fenris. Good to see you again."

Ooh, it's a cold voice. Cruel with amusement, and arrogance, and even if the elf—Fenris—is the one who broke into her kitchen and stole her nameday gift, _this_ is the man she fears.

"I'm surprised you chose to try again," Fenris says. One of the soldiers levels a crossbow at his heart.

"You've made it personal, slave."

Hawke snorts. She can't help it—can't help, either, the reckless fury that sends her clambering to her feet, that spits fat gold droplets of fire from the tips of her fingers, sputtering like oil as they drip to the floorboards beside her bare feet.

" _Mage_ ," hisses the man in the cloak. Fenris has grown very still, gold drops caught in his eyes, hiding all expression.

She doesn't even know him. She doesn't even _know_ him, and here she is, in her nightshirt in her mother's front room, her nameday gift crushed underfoot, emblazoning herself apostate for his sake. _Slave_.

"I'll help you," she tells him, flame licking up her arms. "I'll help you, and you'll replace that bread."

Light flashes across his face, catching weirdly on the white lines marking his throat. The crossbow creaks; the man in the cloak steps forward; Fenris looses a sudden breath and snarls, "I swear it."

" _Good_ ," Hawke snaps, her heart inexplicably racing, and they attack.


	22. AU Meme: Mass Effect (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1160  
 **Prompt:** from thequeenofantiva: Fenris and Hawke biotic brain camp AU?

—

"Hawke," says Varric, and that's all she needs to hear to know she wants no part of this.

"Nope," Hawke says, shaking her head over the box of broken L1 implants, not even stopping her stride down the hallway. "Not a chance. I'm busy. I'm beyond busy."

"You haven't even heard what we want you to do yet."

" _You_ want me to do something. I'm still healing from the _last_ thing you wanted me to do."

"Hey, nobody knew those targets would be so, uh, flammable. This is different! I _swear_."

She's forced to stop at the elevator, jamming the button with her elbow as if that will somehow make it come faster—still not fast enough to keep the smirk from Varric's face as he corners her, arms crossed over his perpetually-unbuttoned uniform. "I'm not interested. Go pick on Aveline."

Varric purses his lips.

"You asked Aveline."

He glances at the ceiling.

"Aveline said no."

He hums something noncommittal.

_"And_ Cullen?"

"'No' is a very strong way to put it, Hawke."

"Damn it," she sighs, and the elevator hisses open. "No promises."

"Fair enough." He follows her onto the elevator, pulling a glowing datapad from his pocket. "There's this guy they want to bring into the program. Human. Bit of a special case."

"They're all special cases. Put him with the other first-years."

"He's over thirty."

Hawke frowns, adjusting the box of implants against the wall. "How is that possible? We didn't even have human biotics until a decade ago. Not real ones, anyway."

"Like I said. Special case." Varric shrugs, and when she props the box against her hip he hands over the datapad.

The salient details are clear enough, written down like this in plain text, but it still takes Hawke two tries to understand what she's reading. "Is this right? This is—this can't be real. This says he's had eezo drilled into his skin. All through it."

"I've seen it myself."

Hawke winces, feeling the twinge of her own L2 at the base of her skull. Eezo tattooed into his body, some impossible tech in his head instead of a standard implant, no apparent memory before 2158, a history of at least three violent incidents, anger issues, authority issues, trust issues. And at the very bottom—

"Nope," Hawke says, and hands back the datapad.

"Come on," Varric wheedles. "This is exactly your kind of thing, Hawke. Another lost soul to add to your merry band."

"I don't have a merry band. I have friends. Most of whom don't have 'committed at least one homicide' in their case file."

"He killed the guy who experimented on him. _After_ rescuing his sister, I should add."

"Varric…"

" _Hawke_." The elevator glides to a gentle halt, but neither of them moves when the doors hiss open. The long hallway to the interim holding quarters stretches out before them, walled with endless stars. Varric's eyes are very serious. "Just meet him, okay?"

Hawke huffs a frustrated breath, bangs fluttering out of her eyes and falling back again. " _Fine_ ," she says at last, and adjusts the weight of the box in her arms. "Fine, you interfering busybody. If he kills me before we shake hands, I'm blaming you."

They hear him before they see him. They've put him in a smaller room at the far end of a hall, and even from a dozen yards away Hawke can hear the shouting, the crash of furniture; she drops the box in a burst of steel and plastic to sprint forward and punch in the access code, and when the door slides open she throws up a stasis bubble as strong as she can make it.

Half a dozen BAaT employees in maroon jumpsuits scattered around the room, two on their backs behind an overturned table, one against the wall. One falling away from the new recruit—and is his hand _inside—_

"Fenris?" Hawke says, both hands held up in as much peace as she can offer, considering the circumstances. His eyes roll furious and mute towards her, held in place by her stasis bubble, his hand—yes, definitely inside Ruvena's chest, a weird biotic glow flickering from the lines that mark his wrist where it disappears into her uniform. Ruvena's mouth is open; her breath comes hard and quick under the shimmering white field. "It is Fenris, isn't it? You, uh, mind letting go of my friend there?"

His eyes narrow. His glare flicks from her to the guard he's holding by the heart; then, as much as the stasis allows, Hawke sees the lines of his arm soften with release.

_Uncomfortable in closed spaces._ So they've put him in a tin can with no escape.

"Thank you," she says, and as the bubble pops free of her mind's hold, the guards sag to the ground, groaning. His hand comes free, lit wrist to fingertip like a damn lightbulb; as it goes dark again, _solid_ again, Ruvena puts both hands to her chest and gasps.

Fenris backs against the wall, head held low, eyes glittering as he watches her. _Hunted,_ she thinks, defensive as a starving stray, made even more dangerous with a power he can't trust. White hair, eezo marks bright with power, dark skin, full lips curled in a sneer. "What do you want?" he asks, and Hawke startles again—somehow she had not expected that voice, expected less to _like_ it—

_Get a grip, idiot! Calm now, flirt later._ "To say hello. Is that okay?"

He stiffens, then straightens. Not as tall as she expects, either— _definitely_ not meant for maroon. " _Your_ people brought me to this place, held me here against my will. It would seem my wishes carry little weight here."

Against—she glares at Varric, who shrugs, and at Ruvena, who has the grace to look embarrassed. "Sorry," Hawke says evenly, and when he makes no move to either speak or lunge she rights the plasteel table, rights two of the nicer green chairs as well. "Honestly. That wasn't supposed to happen. Here," she adds, gesturing at the other chair as she sits. "I'll go first. I'm Hawke. I'm a BAaT graduate, one of the first classes. I'm here because I nearly killed my brother when I was fourteen. I'm supposed to figure out a way to help you."

"Help me," he repeats flatly. The guards have begun to stand, to dust themselves off, silent, sheepish. Fenris ignores them. "Why should I believe you?"

She lifts her hand, letting biotic light flicker between her fingers. "I'll tell you. Show you too, if you want."

For a long moment, Fenris stands very still. His eyes are narrow slashes of green, almost hidden beneath his thick black brows; then, at last, he squares his shoulders, strides across the room, takes the other chair with a decisiveness bordering desperation.

"Fine," he says, short and sharp and holding her gaze so hard she can't help but smile. "Speak."

"You got it," Hawke says, grinning, and begins to talk.


	23. AU Meme: Punk Rock (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 2800  
 **Prompt:** from lilouapproves: "Fenris/Hawke, punk rock :D"  
 **Original Notes:** lilou, oh lilou

"i have to make this one really good," i said, "because it's lilou, only i don't know anything about punk rock so it'll probably be pretty short, right"

ha, ha, ha

—

TAKING BACK NORMAL: An Interview with The Red Champions  
 _by Varric Tethras_

I'm standing in the foyer of one of the most famous couples in the country, about to make one of the most exclusive interviews of my already-illustrious career, and all I can think is that the whole place looks…normal.

 _Really_ normal. Almost disappointingly normal, considering the people who live here are known as much for their revolutionary lyrics as revolutionizing the punk rock scene. I listened to their latest album on the drive up here, looking for inspiration, and one of the lines that I remember best is "let the idol pierce the sky / we're getting out, you and I," from the bitter anthem _Last Straw._ But there's a vase with yellow flowers on a table by the door, and the hardwood floors are swept and polished, and the two dog leashes hanging neatly on a hook by the door don't have a single diamond embedded in them that I can see.

I'm about to check the umbrella stand for drug paraphernalia when the housekeeper shows up. She's a slender woman named Orana, and she's sweet enough I'm almost certain I'm at the wrong place after all, but she leads me up the stairs and down a maze of halls like I'm supposed to be there, and sure enough, by the time we get to the end of the labyrinth I can hear the soft plucking of musical strings behind a solid oak door. Orana knocks and opens the door for me, and then she heads back down the hall and suddenly the music stops and there I am, standing in an open doorway, looking at the people I came to interview.

At least they look a little closer to what I was expecting. The room is better too, the walls plastered with old rock posters, some signed, some torn and faded. Every inch of floor space—and there's a lot of it in this room, by the way—is covered with some kind of musical instrument: a baby grand in the corner, a worn-out drum kit, five electric guitars I can see from the doorway, a trumpet on a stand, an inexplicable full-size floor harp in front of the huge bay windows that overlook the back yard.

Fenris is on the couch set just in front of those windows. He's got a twelve-string acoustic guitar in his hands—the music I'd heard earlier, I figure—that he swings to one side as he stands to greet me. Hawke's there too, perched on the couch's arm; she shakes my hand and gathers up the handwritten sheet music she's scattered around herself, putting it in some order I can't begin to guess at. She sticks it on a clipboard and tucks her pencil behind her ear. I wonder if the rumors that Fenris can't read music are true.

"Glad you could make it," she says, sitting back on the arm of the couch, and unlike a lot of my interviewees, I think she really means it. I can just hear the accent left after ten years of living abroad. "Long trip?"

We make small talk about my travels as Fenris puts the guitar away. He's wearing jeans and a dark vest over a grey button-down, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and of course he's barefoot. His hair's down too, the longer hair on top almost covering the side of his head that's shaved. Hawke's hair is shaggy and loose; she's wearing jeans and brown boots, along with a checkered scarf and a purple t-shirt that has a cartoon bird saying "Talk is cheep."

"I like the shirt," I say, nodding to it, and with her permission bring Bianca out to snap a few pictures. Hawke grins and elbows Fenris in the shoulder as he sits down beside her again; I grab a seat in the hard-backed chair next to the trumpet, close enough to talk comfortably.

"Fenris hates this shirt," Hawke tells me. "He thinks I should strive for a higher standard of linguistic wit."

Fenris rolls his eyes, but he's smiling too, and I'm reminded of why I'm here. "So," I say, pulling out my notebook, "you two want to get started?"

They do, although I think it's because they really just want to be _done_. But that's what happens when it turns out one of my best finds—The Dusters, if you've heard of them—ends up collaborating on the Red Champions' newest album, doing a good enough job in the process that I can get my foot in the door after the first live concert. It's not that I'm trying to dig up dirt—Varric Tethras is too good for that—but considering these two are about as private as their bassist _isn't_ , I'm not passing up this chance.

"How is Isabela, by the way?" I ask, and by the time Hawke's finished telling me I regret asking.

Fenris smirks at my expression. "It's normal for her," he tells me, and I'm struck, as I always am, by how deep his voice is.

So I ask about it. "Why is it you won't get off drums? We've heard you sing on a couple tracks in the past, and you've obviously got the voice for it."

He shakes his head. "I don't have the right…temperament."

"He means he likes hiding behind the kit," Hawke offers. "It takes the right song to get him out of there, and he's picky as a child about the lyrics."

"Perhaps I know how much you prefer the spotlight," Fenris says dryly.

"Anders writes a lot of your songs, right?" I ask. It's a touchy subject, I know—and as soon as I say the name, a look of disgust flickers over Fenris's face. Their longstanding feud is public knowledge, ever since they once got into an open fistfight in the middle of a concert a few years back. But as much as they dislike each other they make _great_ music, and as Hawke leans over his shoulder, I suddenly become sure that the rumors that she's constantly playing peacemaker are true. "He wrote both _Justice_ and _Vengeance_ , didn't he?"

"Yeah," Hawke says. " _Justice_ was the top track of our first album. Anders was more of an idealist back then, not quite so run-down from our tour schedule. We're on the road a lot in the off-season." She glances at Fenris, who gives her a stony glare. " _Vengeance_ came a couple years later, just before we did that stint in Europe where every show sold out. Nobody expected it to blow up like it did."

"Anders did," Fenris mutters, and I sense I'm losing him.

So I change the subject. "What's your favorite part of touring?"

"Coming home," Hawke says with a chuckle, but Fenris shrugs.

"I like the travel."

"What's your favorite place you've been?"

"Italy," they say together, and when Hawke laughs even Fenris cracks a smile. They tell me a bit about it—everyone knows it's where they met, almost seven years ago now—but I didn't know before today that it was when she literally ran him over with a moped. It's a funny story, and Hawke is funny when she's telling it, and by the end of it I'm laughing harder than I expect to. Even Fenris puts in a few comments here and there, sardonic and quiet and still just as entertaining.

"You know," I say, wiping the tears from my eyes, "you two should give more interviews together. You play off each other really well. More people should know you have a sense of humor."

Hawke elbows him again. "I've been saying that for years."

"No."

"He's been saying that for years, too."

"The public's loss," I sigh, but they start arguing good-naturedly about it, and for a while I sit back and just listen. They really do play well, both smart and quick-witted and they hold their own against each other, but what really gets me is that under the needling there's an obvious respect and affection that, frankly, I don't see a lot of in this business. Like a weird feeling that even without the mansion and the best-selling albums and the adoring fans, they'd still somehow _like_ each other.

Eventually, Fenris makes some comment about Hawke's well-known inability to play the guitar, and she reaches over and tousles his hair into white, fluffy chaos. It's kind of sickening, honestly, especially when some of it catches on the piercings in his left ear, and she has to help untangle it again. Doesn't stop me from taking pictures of it, though.

"So, speaking of…" I gesture between them helpfully, "how'd you two start?"

"Honestly?" Hawke throws Fenris a sideways glance that makes me perk up. He gives her some look I can't read, and she turns back to me. "We were friends first," she says, shrugging. "For a long time. And then we had what we thought was a fling right after we started the band, only neither of us could forget it after. Hard to let it fade when you're on stage together every night and a cramped bus all day."

"Isabela refused to let it rest," Fenris adds, scowling. There's not much real irritation to it.

"You did seem to be on-again, off-again for a while, there."

"It was rough," Hawke says. This time Fenris doesn't look away as she talks. "We were both stressed. _Vengeance_ got us a lot of attention in a very short time. We weren't ready for it, and it drained everybody but Isabela trying to cope. Even Sebastian talked about quitting for a while, but Fenris talked him into sticking around."

Fenris purses his lips. "You more than me."

"You tell me where else we were supposed to find a classically-trained strings master that we both actually liked as a person."

"I can play the lap-harp," I offer, and they both laugh. "But rumor has it you've made up pretty thoroughly."

Hawke laughs again, though it's a bit more rueful. "You're talking about the Kirkwall thing."

I shrug. It's the second most-popular hit for the Red Champions on YouTube, just after the music video for _Vengeance_. It's a phone video taken from about the twentieth row of an outdoor arena, not great quality but good enough to see faces. They've just finished _Mirror Image_ at a sold-out concert in Kirkwall—you can hear the tambourines in the background over the drums as Fenris finishes up the song. He's obviously killed it with how loud the crowd's screaming, with how the rest of the band is grinning at him despite how sweaty they all are. Hawke's standing closest; she claps for him around the mic she's forgotten she's still holding, pushes her damp hair out of her eyes with a broad grin, and says something the mic doesn't pick up. Then the video zooms in on the two of them as he half-stands behind the drum kit, leaning over the toms to answer with his sticks held in one hand.

Nobody knows what she says. Nobody knows what he answers, either, despite the thousands of YouTube comments trying to read their lips; the only thing to be sure of is that all of a sudden Hawke's behind the drums, wrapping both arms around Fenris so hard she just about knocks him over, the mic squealing with feedback as she drops it in order to make out with her drummer for almost a full minute. And when I say _make out—_ well, it's a good thing the camera's not any closer, I guess. That much enthusiasm can be dangerous in close proximity.

It's a pretty great video, actually. They both look utterly embarrassed when it's over—Fenris in particular looks ready to die—but Isabela's whooping louder than the crowd by the time Hawke manages to find her mic and get back to the front of the stage for the next song. One of the girls standing near the guy holding the camera keeps shouting "Kiss him again!" It gets annoying after the fourth or fifth time, but somehow they get it together to start _A Bitter Pill_ , though they keep looking at each other, and the video cuts out halfway through the first verse.

It's a lot like they're looking at each other now, actually. Warmth hidden under a lot of mortification.

"Yeah," Hawke says slowly, and covers her face with her hands. "That was…yeah."

"Don't tell me it still bothers you. A lot of people love to see the human side of their heroes."

Fenris snorts, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees, his fingers loosely clasped between them. "Such as it is."

"He made me give a solemn promise to never do something like that again," Hawke tells me.

I chuckle. "So when are you tying the knot, then?"

I expect them to deny it, honestly. It's what most people do when I ask, or they hedge with something noncommittal, like a _we're thinking about maybe sometime in the future_ or _it depends on how the next months go_ or _we haven't really talked about it_. What I _don't_ expect is for Fenris to tip his head and look at Hawke, or for Hawke to look down at Fenris with the oddest smile on her face.

I'm not one for Kodak moments, but I'm also not an idiot. I get about six fantastic shots of them like that, looking at each other, his elbows on his knees in that button-down shirt and vest, her sitting on the arm of the couch with her shaggy dark hair and her purple _talk is cheep_ , the huge window behind them spilling sunlight over their shoulders like a bucket's been dumped out. Then Hawke looks at me.

"Truth is, we already did."

I am going to single-handedly save the dying print industry with this story. "… _When_?"

"About…" she glances up to the ceiling, then at Fenris, "six months ago?"

"Just after the Glasgow show," he agrees. "It was…sudden."

"By which he means that we stopped at a courthouse on the way back to the hotel. Very sudden."

"Why did you choose then?"

"I don't know," Hawke says, and looks at Fenris again. "It just seemed like it was time to stop waiting."

Fenris nods. Smiles, too, though it's a bit reluctant, and when Hawke ruffles his hair again he rolls his eyes. "It did result in a number of disappointed bettors."

"For your information, Isabela's still holding a grudge against me."

Fenris laughs, and I shake my head, and after a few more questions I can hardly remember, the interview winds to a close. I check with them twice that it's okay for me to print this—I do _not_ want to deal with the honorable Aveline Hendyr, Esq. or her legendary pursuit of her clients' unwanted paparazzi—but Hawke assures me it's fine, and Fenris doesn't disagree outside a few insincere grumbles about privacy.

"Aveline said we ought to let it out," Hawke tells me as we walk back to the front door. "And of all the journalists Merrill found, you seemed to be the one with the most integrity."

I shake my head as I slip my notes back in my bag, as Fenris opens the front door of this blastedly _normal_ house. "Most people would consider that an oxymoron, you know."

"Yeah, well. Were we wrong?"

I look at Hawke. She's smiling, leaning against Fenris in the doorway; he looks just about as relaxed as she is, and I can see his hand curling around her waist as if he's used to holding her. _Normal_ , I think again, but I remember the car accident that killed her dad, and the rumors of a rough childhood that gave him some pretty horrible scars. The media raking them both to pieces over the band, the tragedies, the break-ups and make-ups. Maybe they deserve a little normal for once.

"No," I say at last. "You weren't wrong."

When I finally leave, it's with a promise to send them a copy of the article and a pair of front-row tickets to their next show. Isabela, apparently, wants to meet me with a few ideas for some new articles. There's a backstage pass, too, if I decide to go, and somehow I figure there might be a beautiful partnership in here if I play my cards right. And why not? It seems like fun.

They'll need someone to photograph the honeymoon tour, after all.


	24. AU Meme: Princess Bride (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1800  
 **Prompt:** from marigoldfaucet: "Fenris and F!Mage Hawke. The Princess Bride. (How could I possibly not ask this, after reading your amazing Austen AU?)"  
 **Original Notes:** So I'm going to have to make an errata post or something for how much extra stuff I had to figure out to get this to work. That said, _ahhh_ , this was _so much fun_. It's probably going to be the last thing I'm able to write for a while, since my first board exam is coming up in March (aiiiieee), so I wanted to go out with something I truly enjoyed writing.

—

"Rest, Champion," he says, and thrusts her none-too-gently towards the flat boulder capping the hill.

Hawke barely catches herself to sit without falling, magebane and exhaustion still running ice-thick in her veins. "Such generosity," she snaps, shoving her hair from her eyes. "What else should I expect from the captain of _The_ _Siren's Call_?"

If he is affected by her revelation he does not show it, neither flinching nor shifting his weight; his eyes hold hers as steady as steel behind the black mask tied over his eyes and head, knotted at the nape of his neck. The only mark of feeling is the faintest tightening of his lips, the stretch of the silver brands that course over his chin and down the center of his throat to vanish into the narrow, deep collar of his loose-fitting black shirt. "I have made no secret of it."

"Then I will not keep the secret that the moment I can, I will kill you."

He— _smirks._ And sheaths his sword on his back, the long, finely-crafted hilt spearing upward over his shoulder. "Fine threats from a woman with no strength."

"Magebane only lasts so long. You will have to slit my throat to stop me."

Easily, with a curious slant: "Should I be gratified to inspire such hatred?"

"Most people," Hawke says, so far beyond fury that she floats above it, a white and roaring sea, "would wish to kill the man who murdered someone precious to them."

"Precious."

"Yes…" Hawke breathes, her gaze sliding away from the man in black and into history, into the warmer memories of long, quiet afternoons of a small farmhouse at the edge of the woods, of fields washed green and gold by the seasons' turning—and a man with greener eyes, and a rarer smile, and strong hands so hard around the hilt of a spade, of a sword, unexpectedly gentling as they touched her own…

She closes her eyes, opens them again, hard as flint. "You killed the man I love."

"You are promised to another even now."

"I do not love Gascard. He knows this. He helped my mother, once, before her illness took her."

His lip curls. "So you give yourself to the first man with a kind hand. An enduring faithfulness indeed."

"You think I care for the mockery of a murderer? You killed two people with one stroke on that ship. My heart was torn from my chest the day he died."

"Such things happen when one braves the dangers of the open sea."

"He did not go by _choice_ ," Hawke snaps. The man in black looks at her without speaking; abruptly, she rises to her feet, her hands fisted, her anger so hot beneath her skin she can barely think. "He was a slave, once. His master came for him and _took_ him, despite our every effort, despite all the preparations we had made to fight him. I nearly died. When I woke in the healer's house in the city he was gone, and the man I loved was gone with him. I looked for him…"

"Not well enough to find him, it seems."

"The moment I could stand I went after them both. I tracked them east and then north, to the coast, where his master had booked passage on a ship, but I came too late and the ship had already gone. I raced by horse to meet them—but before I was halfway to Minrathous word came to me, that the _Call_ had attacked the ship, that she had sunk with all her cargo. All hands were lost."

She had forgotten the cut of this sorrow. Her voice trails away, into nothing; the man in black shifts his weight, stepping closer, circling her where she stands by the flat boulder. Almost—gently: "I remember this ship. I will tell you, if you wish."

She closes her eyes. "Tell me."

"We ran upon them three years ago. There was a man with grey hair and a beard, and another accompanying him—your friend, I suppose. The _Call_ bears little love for those who beg."

"He would not have begged."

A quick, slight movement of one black-gloved hand, not quite a flinch. "His master did. Your friend did not. He stood, though he bled from many wounds, and told me that he could not die there. That he had to live."

Hawke turns her head, shuddering; the man in black stops by her shoulder, his masked face a smear of shadow at the edge of her vision, as present and implacable as the iron-grey sky. "He talked of you," he continues, his voice low. There is something— "Or someone that may have been you. I had my dagger at his throat, but he looked me in the eye and said, with absolute certainty, 'There is a woman who loves me.'"

She swallows roughly, grief high and hard in her throat. "Even for that. And even for that, you could find no mercy."

"Mercy?" Now he is steel again, sneering, his arms crossing over his chest. "Would it have been mercy to let him live, to find you so steadfast to his memory? Tell me: did you wait for his body to sink into the sea before you gave yourself to your mage-prince, or was he still fresh enough to feed those creatures that live in the deep waters?"

She is on him. It does not matter that he has bested every one of her captors, that he carries his sword like it is of one piece with his heart, that magebane still flickers in her blood—her rage totally consumes it, burning away all weakness in the impossible, unbearable storm of grief and fury surging inside her. Her fingers wrap around his throat; his eyes go wide as she _shoves,_ somehow catching him off-guard, his weight on the wrong foot, his sword useless as she topples him to his back on the boulder behind him. His head slams against the rock; his throat whitens under her crushing grip as she kneels over him, robes snagged on stone; fire reflects in his eyes as she jerks her other hand back, her long sleeve riding high as brilliant white-hot flame begins to drip from every finger—

Lightning-fast, his hand closes in a vise around her wrist. His breath sighs out in a rush, his eyes locked immobile, staring, to the worn red band bound there, where it has been bound for three years.

His head falls back against the stone. His mouth works—and then, words out of memory so faint and distant she cannot grasp them, can barely hear them for the blood beating in her ears:

He breathes, " _I am yours_."

She stills. She stills, and the fire sputters out with a quiet gasp—

His hair tangles in the knot of his mask when she yanks it free. He winces, a hiss of discomfort between his teeth; then the cloth tears away all at once and he blinks up at her in the open grey light of day, his face bare, green eyes too tight with sorrow.

She can't breathe.

"How," she gasps, fingers coming to his cheek, trembling, to the black hair going bone-white at the temples, to the new pale scars she does not know, to the curve of a jaw she has not touched in three years. His black eyebrows—his ears—his _nose_. How many times has she touched—how many times has she _dreamed_ of glimpsing again, if only for a _moment_ —her heart pounds so hard it hurts. "How—you—but you _died—_ "

He shifts his weight on the boulder until he can reach for her, his fingers sliding into her hair, just as unsteady as hers and all the bitterer for how long she has missed them. He says—and his _voice_ , how could she have forgotten it, how could she have let time dull her memory so badly, when she'd tried so _hard_ to keep every part of him alive in her mind and her heart because without that she would have nothing, _nothing_ , even his scent faded from the rooms, even his touch gone to dust, even his body taken by the seas…

" _Hawke_ ," Fenris says again, so gently it hurts, and she realizes abruptly that she is weeping, _has_ been, his thumbs stroking through the dampness on her cheeks as if they might make a difference. His head comes up, away from the stone, just barely tilting before his brow pinches in uncertainty and he—hesitates—

"Oh, _damn_ you," Hawke whispers, and kisses him. Hard and frantic and again, and again, and again—he comes to meet her every time, his face alight with a grave, overwhelming gladness, clutching at her hair, at her shoulders, pulling her weight full atop him where he lies on the boulder. She spills into him, already laughing through the tears; somehow they twist until Fenris has head and shoulders above her, his hand cupping her head, his mouth sealed hard to hers.

Dead. He was _dead_ , Hawke thinks, closing her eyes against the crush of grief, crushing herself closer to him—and buried by the sea, and mourned as one who is dead is mourned.

The kiss eases. She presses her lips to his twice more, and then to the corner of his mouth, and to his cheek. He bends against her in a spasm of sorrow; he says, "Forgive me, Hawke. I meant to come sooner."

She laughs, stroking through the hair at the nape of his neck. "I have been given back a life I thought was gone from me forever. There is no apology for that."

He lifts his head, a look in his eyes to take her breath away—and high above them, just over the hill-rise that marks the valley's edge, a clear silver trumpet sounds an alarm.

Between one breath and the next his heart vanishes from his eyes, his jaw setting as he stands and pulls her to her feet. "DuPuis will be on us soon. We must make for the Wilds."

"The Wilds? The Witch will be on us in minutes."

"An old legend. I doubt she exists."

"A dangerous doubt," Hawke murmurs, but even such doubts cannot keep her heart from flying when he takes her hand, when the corner of his mouth—his lips, and she had _forgotten_ —turns up in a smile. She laughs—and then she fumbles at her own wrist, pulling the cloth free with her teeth, holding Fenris in place until she can tie again where it belongs. Where she belongs.

He touches the place where the red band knots, just under his thumb, wondering. "You kept it."

"I promised. Until you came home to me again."

Fenris kisses her, true as daybreak. "I am home."

And, for the first time in three years—so is she.


	25. AU Meme: Miscellaneous

**Characters/Pairing:** Zevran/Anders  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 250  
 **Prompt:** from ojirawel: "Look okay I just finished Awakening the other day and I need pre-Justice-Anders and Zevran, and I don't care where it is. If it has to be an AU just stick it at college."

—

"It is," Zevran says at last, passing the paper back, "a very…passionate essay."

"But not enough to pass," Anders says glumly as he thumbs the bright red F at the top of the page. "Dr. Thekla said I failed to answer the prompt."

Zevran laughs, lounging beside him on the worn leather sofa, and even with a failing grade Anders can't help but smile. If his RA hadn't taken him under his wing his freshman year would have ended with his prank on the Phi Omega templars, but Zevran had known their president and…persuaded him otherwise. Anders hasn't asked how.

Of course, as Zev's arm drops lightly behind his shoulders, he figures he has a pretty good idea. "The assignment was on the ethics of human rights, yes?"

Anders lets out a rueful laugh. "Yes. He said he'll let me write another one if I stay on topic this time."

Zevran smiles, one of those terrible warm _intimate_ smiles that makes the hair on Anders's arms stand up and his chest grow hot, and when his RA leans close enough that their legs touch from thigh to knee, Anders doesn't pull away.

"I will help you," he says, the suggestion as much a purr as anything, "and together we will persuade him otherwise, hmm?"

"Yeah," he says, throat dry, not entirely sure they're still talking about the paper. Maybe this time—

(Not sure either, as Zevran's eyes crinkle into a smile, the tattoo just outside his left eye wrinkling with it, if he cares.)

—

**Characters/Pairing:** Zevran/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 560  
 **Prompt:** from anonymous: "Pairing: Fenris/Zevran; AU Setting: Modern Europe (Barcelona? Venice?); oh dear lord I am the silly today."  
 **Original Notes:** well here is a silly fill to keep you company (seriously i have no idea what this is)

—

The goalkeeper is _taunting him_.

At first it's only a soft chuckle as the ball ricochets off the uprights and Fenris wheels back to midfield. Then it's a whistle and a wink at the end of the first quarter-hour when a collision sends him skidding on his stomach across the grass; _worse,_ the man has the audacity to extend a hand, after. Fenris bats it away in irritation and stands up on his own, checking the toe of his left cleat where it tore the turf before jogging back towards the rest of his team.

He sneaks looks, later, when he can. Barcelona's keeper is short, slim, with blond hair tied in a messy braid; he knows very little about him save his excellent handwork and his…more social reputation, but he had not heard that sociability to extend to the _pitch_.

One glance catches Arainai running a finger along his collar where sweat has stuck it to his tanned skin. The motion is slower than it needs to be, preposterously graceful under the stadium lights—he _cannot_ be thinking this, not now in the middle of a _match_ , and Fenris jerks his attention back to the ball.

He can feel Arainai's eyes on the back of his neck.

He scores at the end of the half. It's a good drive with the left forward, Carver keeping the ball until the last second; Fenris feints left and goes right, and though Arainai makes an excellent dive it's not enough to keep it out of the corner of the net. His shout is as much vindictiveness as satisfaction, even lost to the roar of the crowd; still, Arainai grins and lifts an eyebrow as if to say _yes, and?_

They win the match, 1-0, Fenris's score the only goal of the night. He finds Arainai in the crowd after, that red silk almost as much peacock as its wearer; he wraps a hand in it and tugs, and says, "What was the meaning of that?"

"Of what?" says Arainai, unperturbed, as if he is quite used to strange men approaching him in mixed vexation and curiosity.

"You know what I mean."

"My friend, I wonder if we should discuss this somewhere more comfortable. Paco Meralgo, perhaps."

Startled, Fenris releases his shirt. Around them the crowd moves and swells and laughs and shouts; Arainai watches him with a faint, ironic smile, his weight all on one leg, his shoulders easy and loose. Sweat, sliding into the collar of his red shirt—

"Fenris!" comes a shout behind them, and a grinning, sweaty Carver barrels through the crowd to wrap Fenris in a hug. It takes him a moment to push him off—as big as the man is he rarely realizes his own strength—and somehow the twisting sends him backwards until he is side by side with Arainai. "Fenris," says Carver, "we're going to go out and meet Spanish women. We're going to go to a museum too, maybe—Beth says there're some _great_ ones here—and hey, keeper, great game—you want to come?"

He hesitates. Where Carver cannot see it, fingers brush against the small of his back. His eyes cut sideways; Zevran looks entirely unconcerned, watching him as if his answer means nothing at all.

_Damn the man_ , Fenris thinks, exasperated beyond belief, and goes with him to dinner.

—

**Characters/Pairing:** Varric  & Hawke  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 202  
 **Prompt:** from perahn: "Varric and Hawke, Robin Hood. :D"  
 **Original Notes:** (I am _determined_ to stick to three sentences here, because you keep doing them so darn well.)

—

The creek was cold and the tree-trunk bridge narrow, and because neither of them would yield to the other they set a wager: an exchange of tales, with the winner the first to cross.

The lady, tall and cloaked in green, went first; hoping to impress him, she told a story of a corrupt magistrate waylaid on the road and relieved of his purses, and the curious relief of taxation in the nearby village that followed; and then the little man went after, with a tale of a crossbow that made the lady both weep and smile, and when he finished it was with such good humor despite the pain that her laughter slipped her foot on the tree-trunk and sent her into the stream below.

He crossed and she clambered to the bank, dripping wet, and when they had introduced themselves she said, "Your heart is too big, Little Varric, but I would have you join my merry band;" and he replied, laughing, "Marry, I will, for despite your sodden state you told your story well; and as for me, who tells tales for a living, there is no tale I wish to tell so much as that of the Hawke!"

—

**Characters/Pairing:** Sten/f!Brosca  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 163  
 **Prompt:** from maybethings: "CURVEBALL! Sten, f!Brosca, music industry"

—

Nobody expects the video to go viral—it's a strings duet with original pieces, after all, not exactly the cute young hipsters who keep doing a cappella covers of Top 40 hits—but something about the tiny square woman playing the bass taller than she is catches the public's eye, and the next thing anyone knows the Dusters are no. 9 on the charts and climbing.

It's not even that they need a third in the group, not really, but Leske has been arguing for a high voice to balance out the bass under his viola for ages, and when he finds a friend of a friend who's not only fanatically devoted to his craft but doesn't even want a paycheck, Brosca can't find a reason to say no.

(Leske fails to mention that the man's a giant, fails also to mention that his piccolo case has _Asala_ engraved on it in silver gilt—but regardless, it's the loveliest music she's ever heard.)


	26. Nice Night for an Evening I (Hawke/Fenris)

****AN:**** The following dozen or so ficlets were written very late in an evening following a _really_ excellent party. I have nothing else to say in my defense.

* * *

**Characters/Pairing:** Leda, F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 440  
 **Prompt:** from anonymous: "I miss your kidfics! How about Fenris with a teenaged Leda (or any other child OC) ?"

—

"No."

Her father is not pleased. Leda knows he's not pleased; the furrow between his brows is sharper than ever, his arms crossed across his chest. Mama, in the chair behind him, looks no less unhappy.

"It's only for a little while," she tries. "A month. Maybe two."

"Orlais is too far," her father says. "Too dangerous."

"I've been looking after myself long enough."

"You're _sixteen_ ," says Mama, standing now, coming to stand by Papa in a surprisingly effective show of unity. "And you know the risks of your name."

Leda draws in a sharp breath through her nose, struggling to keep her calm, irritated by her own frustration. " _Your_ name. It's not my fault I'm stuck with it!"

Her father glances over at her mother, one black eyebrow lifting in something she thinks might be amusement. Even worse—she _hates_ it when they have these silent conversations, when a hundred words pass between them in the space of a mouth twitching, or one quick glance to the side.

_Parents._

Her father looks at her, green eyes so like her eyes stern and steady and blastedly uncompromising. "The answer is no."

"I promised Marrin I'd be able to go with her!" She's whining now and she knows it, but she's _sixteen_ , and her father is perfectly content to sit here in the little cottage in Wilhaven with her mother for a thousand years and _die_ and he doesn't understand this wanderlust that wakes her in the night, this need to get anywhere but _here_. "Please, Papa? _Please._ "

His dark brows come together again, though it's not the flat denial it was before. He steps closer without speaking, his mouth turning down; Leda waits patiently as he brushes his hand down her cheek, smooths a bit of dark hair out of her face where it's fallen in her eyes. He cups her cheek; she leans into it despite herself, quirking an annoyed sort of smile at her father, aware of his too-lined face softening, aware of his fingers so like her fingers at her temple.

He says, absently, "You've grown so tall." Then he looks to Mama where she stands, and they have one of those wordless conversations that lasts a moment and a lifetime at once, and she looks at him and smiles and he _sighs,_ one of those delightful irritated resigned sighs that tells Leda she might have cause to hope.

" _Fine_ ," Papa says at last, and adds with more of a smile than she expects, "One of us will go with you."

Her heart leaps. "I'm all right with that," she says a little breathlessly, and Mama laughs.

* * *

**Characters/Pairing:** Varania, Leto  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 440  
 **Prompt:** from servantofclio: "Leto and Varania as squabbling kids"

—

His _sister._ Stupid stubborn Varania who won't mind her own business and won't keep her mouth _shut_ when she should. He hisses, "This is your fault!"

"Isn't!" Varania snaps back, her eyes bright with angry tears, her mouth drawn down in an unhappy frown. "Mother told you to share it with me!"

 _"After_ chores!" he retorts, though not as loudly as he'd like. His mother stands with the overseer at his little desk on the other side of the room; he's not shouting, which is good, but his mother's eyes are down to the ground and the little toy ball that'd started everything is held too tightly in her hands. Stupid Varania, who wouldn't _wait—_

"Just keep them out of the master's sight," the overseer sighs at last, handing back the ball, and their mother dips a swift bow before hurrying both of them out of the man's little clay house, even though he's nearly nine years old and too old to be holding his mother's hand.

He holds Varania's hand in his other. Even as mad as he might be, he knows that Varania needs to be protected. Even as weak—

"Mother," Varania says, wheedling and pouting as they clear the bare-sand yard before the overseer's house. "Mother, he wouldn't share—"

"Oh, _children,_ " their mother sighs, and abruptly turns and drops to her knees before both of them. "How much danger will you seek before you realize? Take this—" and she presses the ball into Varania's hand, and Leto frowns hard because it is _his_ , and yet his mother's voice is so stern— "Do not bring this out again. Not where anyone can see. Only when you are alone and your chores are finished and there is no one to bring you in to work again. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Leto says slowly, because—he thinks he does, though Varania's mouth is still pulled down hard at the corners. "Yes, Mother."

"Good," she says, and strokes his hair in a way that makes him sad. "Go play while you can."

He takes Varania's hand again, pulls her to one of the side yards where the master does not walk and his guards will not see. It's a good, long alley, perfect for throwing balls, and while Varania runs down to the other end Leto glances back, just once, at the place where his mother stands.

She lifts her hand once, smiles, and turns away.

Varania shouts at him to throw the ball, and he does, but—there is a cold chill behind his heart, and no matter how he tries he cannot forget the grief in his mother's eyes.

* * *

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 470  
 **Prompt:** from maybethings: "Hawke, Fenris, herbs"

 **Original Notes:** My mother had a lemon verbena plant for years and years and years. I loved that plant; it smelled so good, and when I went to college my mom said she'd give me a houseplant, and I asked for lemon verbena. I killed it immediately, of course, but it's one of my favorite plants because of her.

—

He does not understand this fascination Hawke has with dirt.

Perhaps it is a Fereldan thing, he thinks in his more charitable moments, when she is charmingly tousled and her cheeks bright with sunlight. At other times, when she is streaked with dirt in every crevice and she insists on sliming sweat across his forehead, he is not so inclined to amusement. She is _so_ easily entertained—

"Why?" he asks her, one afternoon when the sun is hot and the shadows hotter and she kneels in the middle of a dirty patch of earth in the shade of the yew tree behind her estate. He knows the heat well enough—even Kirkwall's hottest days win nothing against Tevinter summers—but she is Fereldan and made for colder climes, and he knows she does not take this warmth well.

"Oh," she says, sitting back on her heels, looking pensively at the trowel across one knee. "I don't know. I mean, I know I could buy most of them well enough, or Orana could do this, but…" She looks up at him, purses her lips, looks further to the summer-blue sky. "My parents used to keep an herb garden in Lothering. My father was better at it than my mother, though they both spent hours in there, and sometimes when we'd have soup or stew and they'd bring in these plants from the yard just _bursting_ with sunlight and smell and…I don't know. I think of them. It makes me think of them."

Fenris does not know how to answer that. He has no memories of herb gardens, no fond thoughts of a mother to bring this conversation to perspective. He has only perfectly-cooked meals seen only from a distance, gardens passed only in pursuit of another slave at his master's command—

"Here," Hawke says, and plucks some plant-blade or another from its stalk. "Smell this."

He does. It smells of something—crisp, and sharp, and vaguely citrus, and all at once he remembers in the dimmest shadow of a flash a woman's voice—

"Lemon verbena," Hawke says, smiling a lopsided smile. "My mother used to keep little pots of it around the house. Bethany and I used to sneak leaves of it into our pillows at night."

He remembers—

"I like this," he says, the words drawing out of him slow and reluctant as wire through a forge, stronger all at once from the fire. Hawke watches him without speaking as he breaks the leaf in two, lifting one waxy piece to better smell the sharp scent bursting free. He cannot quite—but somehow, it seems right. He suggests, knowing the smirk it will provoke, "Plant more of this."

He wakes three mornings later to a little pot of verbena on his windowsill instead, but he finds that an acceptable substitute.


	27. Nice Night for an Evening II (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 384  
 **Prompt:** from anonymous: "Eppie Hawke and Fenris, sunrise"

—

Fenris has always been an early riser, even from the earliest places of his memory. He has seen enough sunrises to last a lifetime, suns rising dull and grey with winter, harsher through red skies in the birth of a storm, bright and brilliant and hot in a cloudless summer blue, burning away the morning mists in dewdrops made of gold and silver. There is no mystery left to enthrall him.

And yet.

And yet, the first morning he wakes in Hawke's bed, with Hawke asleep beside him and her arm across his stomach, her nose pressed against his shoulder, a thin pale line of dawn tracing down her cheek—

"Good morning," Hawke whispers, the words a breath against his skin, softer even though the dulled sensation of the lyrium stripes. One blue eye cracks open soft and sleepy, and a corner of her mouth quirks a smile. "Sleep well?"

He has. For the first time in a long time, though he does not know if that is due to contentment or exertion. He finds he doesn't particularly care. "Yes."

"Mm." She closes her eyes again, moves closer, sighing as his arm finds its way around her back, as his mouth wanders home to her forehead. He does not know how two people ought to behave in bed together when one is not master and there is no over-brimming lust. It seems a very simple thing to be so strange.

"And you?" There, a safe question.

Hawke sighs again in answer, and somehow her fingers trail their way up his stomach to palm flat against his chest, over his heart. It skips once, the traitorous thing, and beats harder as if to spite him, though Hawke says nothing and neither does he, his hand tightening against her, her feet tangling with his beneath her sheets.

It is so _still_. Birds outside the window, some whippoorwills calling back and forth to each other; not even the markets are awake yet at this hour, with dawn so young and the light so pale and gold.

Fenris has never seen her look so content.

Her mouth presses softly to his collarbone, her voice quiet and thick with sleep, soft even in the hush of sunrise that surrounds them. "I'm glad you're still here, Fenris."

So is he.

* * *

**Characters/Pairing:** Leda, Isabela, F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 616  
 **Prompt:** from anonymous: "Isabela being the best/worst babysitter for little Leda Hawke :3"

—

Aunt Isabela is the best.

Aunt Isabela is only the best because Mama and Papa don't know how amazing she is, which is probably why she keeps getting to go on the trips she wants to take her on. It's easy to be excited about a delivery of cargo when that cargo is spices and the delivery goes to a shady merchant on the Rivaini coast, who smells of cinnamon and wears a dozen gold earrings in one ear, who winks at her and calls her delicious.

(Aunt Isabela hits him when he does that, though it's a friendly sort of blow. She doesn't take Leda back to meet him again, though.)

It's harder to keep the secrets when they come back, however, when Leda's brown as the islanders and wild-eyed with adventure and her parents are just the same as they ever were, keeping house calm and quiet and boring as any old couple gone on in years, who never knew adventure before. Still, she gives them their gifts, gold jewelry and brilliant blue silks for Mama, little shining knives for Papa (if not as good as the ones she keeps for herself), and she tells them the safe stories of sailors laughing and the way the sea looked at early dawn, and when they go to bed (so _early_ , so sad), she lies on the low sofa in the sitting room and dreams of the way the sun glinted off her dagger, or the soft breathless hush just before the stars broke through the gap in a cave's roof, lighting up the jewels hidden there like a thousand little stars of their own.

And then one night when she's home and it's quiet she wakes just after midnight, her mouth dry and her bladder full. It's a short, irritated walk to the privy and back again—but it's on the way back when she hears the voices in the sitting room, low and familiar and _how_ are her parents up so late, even if Isabela is here?

Eighteen years of soft-footed stealth takes her to the cracked door, and she closes her eyes as Papa's voice carries out into the night.

"And you're sure she was safe?"

"Oh, please," Isabela says, a scoff in her tone that Leda's heard too many times directed her way. "You think I'd let anything happen to her?"

"The last time you said that, she walked with a limp for three weeks."

"And she was thrilled to have it. Not every young woman gets to spend her summers hanging upside-down from my rigging."

Mama laughs, familiar and dear. "I spent enough time doing that to know how quickly the novelty wears away. You said you raided a cave?"

"Mm," murmurs Isabela, and Leda leans forward, just enough to see her cross her legs in the soft chair, her dark thighs dimly lit by the two candles burning on the end table. "Just a little one. Abandoned for _years_."

Papa shakes his head, but Mama leans closer, grinning, and knocks his temple gently with her own. "It's all right, Fenris. You know Leda's got to get free sooner or later."

Leda's breath catches in her throat. Her mother— _pride_ in her voice, and love, and something stronger that she cannot name, something flickering in her father's eyes just as fiercely.

They _know_. Have they always known?

"Isabela," Papa says at last, and he is quiet and fond and sure. "Take care of her."

Aunt Isabela's eyes flick to the crack in the door, just for an instant, to meet Leda's in the shadows. Her heart stutters; Isabela smiles, quick as light on a blade, and says, "With all I've got."

* * *

**Characters/Pairing:** Varric, F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 368  
 **Prompt:** from my-lord-magikarp: "Fenris and Varric talking about anything and everything at the Hanged Man, or another appropriate place."

**Original Notes:** Somewhere in the middle of Act One. Fenris can't read but he's got Opinions; Varric doesn't know he can't read, though it's an interesting dynamic.

—

It's the middle of the day, so they're not drinking; it's too early for cards; there's no job to rush off to or mercenaries to kill. And yet, here they are, sitting in his suite, and…it's _nice_.

Certainly nicer than Varric expects, considering the natural taciturnity of the elf currently occupying the armchair across form his desk. If it were Isabela, she'd be needling him about the latest chapter of _Loose Cannon_ ; if it were Aveline, she'd be doing the same thing for a different reason, which he suspects would be entirely less pleasant. More risky in terms of his printing press's integrity, anyway.

But here they are, having a perfectly sanguine conversation about linguistic complications in translations in comparison to strictly transformative works, and it's— _nice_. The elf has a number of opinions, certainly, some of which are rather entrenched—Varric takes vocal offense to his position that stories set down in print are immutable from that point on—but hey, he's had bitterer arguments with stubborner people, and at least Fenris is willing to entertain the opposing position.

"It does not change," Fenris says, leaning forward in his chair. "The words are in ink, black and white on the page. Any chance to alter them is therefore forfeit."

Varric snorts. "Ever heard of an addendum? Errata? Nobody's perfect, elf, least of all a writer."

"Except you, naturally."

"Naturally."

Fenris rolls his eyes, smirking. It's a good look on him, a sort of rebel-with-a-cause disdain for authority, and Varric makes a mental note to give Donovan a little more nuance in future. "You are nothing if not modest, dwarf."

"What can I say? Some of us were just born for the burden of power."

Fenris laughs outright at that, and for the briefest instant Varric catches a glimpse of why Hawke is so aflutter over the blasted man. And then—speak of the devil, but if Hawke doesn't walk in right at that moment, paused mid-step at the sight of the two of them so comfortably entrenched in his suite.

"Am I interrupting something?" she asks, her eyebrows lifted in uncertainty.

"No," says Varric, looking to Fenris, surprised to find it true, "just a conversation between friends."

* * *

**Characters/Pairing:** F!Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** K+  
 **Word Count:** 376  
 **Prompt:** from lilouapproves: "If you're still doing them, how about Fenris and Hawke having a few drinks together?"

—

_Hawke doesn't hold her liquor_ , Isabela tells him right before the first time. He thinks he understands. He's seen so many excesses before, seen magisters and slaves alike sick to death from alcohol. He thinks he is prepared.

Now, years later, he is still surprised every time.

"Fenris," Hawke says behind him, and before he can even begin to look her fingertips are tap-tapping down his chest, smoothing across the leather over his ribs. "Fenris, you've got your shirt on."

"Yes," he says, catching her fingers in his own, holding her hands captive as he twists on the couch in her library.

Hawke bends forward, apparently not noticing the awkward angle as her cheek slips against his own; she wiggles her fingers in his grasp and says, "Why?"

"Why?" he says, distracted by the way her hands slip and slide against his, by the faint tendrils of unfocused magic that glide so freely from her skin to his own.

Hawke sighs, turns her head to mouth the skin beneath his ear. "Why, what?"

Fenris shakes his head, his eyes slipping shut, his grip on Hawke's hands loosening despite himself. Only a few glasses of wine—and a tumbler of unwatered whiskey—and a swallow of something clear and Nevarran—

"Fenris," Hawke sighs into his ear, and he shudders as her hands spread across his chest, as she fumbles her way through one, two, three opening clasps. Then her hands are hot on his bare chest, sparking bits of lyrium in their wake, and he shudders again.

"Be careful, Hawke," he warns her, hardly knowing what he says, hardly caring that his hand reaches up, finds the back of her neck to hold her mouth against his throat. A wolf's throat—

Hawke laughs, a low, throaty thing that ripples down into his stomach, and he presses a blind kiss to her jaw. She laughs again—and then somehow she slithers over the back of the couch until she is mostly in his lap, one knee crooked between his thigh and the arm of the sofa, her arms tight around his neck, her tongue in his mouth.

_Why—_

Why not, he decides, and spends the last thought in his head on the hope that the door is locked.


	28. Nice Night for an Evening III (Misc)

**AN:** Miscellaneous gen or non-Hawke/Fenris ships.

* * *

**Characters/Pairing:** Sten/Brosca  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 248  
 **Prompt:** from maybethings: "Sten/Brosca, sword and shield"

—

She knows her purpose. He respects that.

Respects _her_ , though it costs him something to admit it the first time, before she is _kadan_ and before she remakes his soul into one piece. She wears the brand like honor; she wears the brand like shame, depending on the place she stands and the person to whom she speaks. He does not understand that. To know oneself is to know purpose; she knows what she is and yet she questions it, and fears it, and hides it and wears it proudly all at once.

And yet when she walks once more among her own people it is with purpose; she speaks to the ones of her kind who would be king and carries her resolve on her face. He knows that desperation, even if she keeps it hidden behind her words.

(Another thing that perplexes him—how many of her kind wage war without once lifting a sword.)

But then one night she comes to him with a blade wrapped in cloth, and he takes it from her with no small suspicion and no small hope. The brown cloth slides away so quickly, as if it cannot bear to hide the sword beneath it. _Asala_ , he thinks, a hot tight knot in his chest that he does not recognize.

How easily she returns to him his soul.

How easily she smiles, as if his gratitude should matter to her. As if that is reward enough.

As if she—

cares—

* * *

**Characters/Pairing:** Zevran, Alistair  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 485  
 **Prompt:** from ojirawel: "Something with Zevran and Alistair being bros?"

—

Alistair winces. "You're lying."

" _Ah_ , my friend," and isn't that the most perfectly injured tone he's ever heard, all wounded dignity and injured pride and deeply-felt sorrow at his own ignorance. "I swear to you, it happened just as I say."

"You mean to tell me that you—and four Orlesians—and a _pigeon—_ "

"Brought in one afternoon a Tevinter slaving ring to a fabulously disastrous end? Oh, yes."

Alistair frowns pensively into his glass. Not nearly as full as it was earlier—he's not entirely sure how that happened. Perhaps Zevran has been stealing again. That seems a roguish thing to do. Or a Zevran…ish thing, anyway.

Did Zevran say something? "What?"

Zevran looks at him, one perfectly-manicured eyebrow lifted. Alistair is intrigued by those eyebrows. He's seen Zevran plucking them sometimes in Morrigan's fancy golden mirror. He's not sure why. He's not even sure Morrigan knows who stole the mirror in the first place.

Ha, not that he'd tell her. Bloody angry Wilds-mage. Doesn't even like mabari.

"My dear Warden," Zevran says, and Alistair has never noticed before how smoothly the Antivan accent rolls off his tongue, although now that he thinks about it probably a lot of things have rolled off Zevran's tongue in the past, and he should probably stop thinking about that now if he doesn't want his cheeks to burst into flames right here in this terrible tiny inn in the middle of nowhere. "My dear Warden, perhaps you should allow me to relieve you of your…what was it? Flying Knight?"

"Flying Templar," Alistair mutters, but when Zevran deftly plucks the squat little glass from between Alistair's elbows he doesn't protest.

The tip of his nose is numb. That seems like a sign. He's not sure what of, but it's definitely a sign.

"Why don't you follow me," Zevran suggests so much later in that perfect Antivan accent, and Alistair nods dumbly, and somewhere between the smiling serving wench and the minefield of empty chairs he manages to trail after Zevran like a lost puppy up the stairs and down the hall to a blessedly dim room, where there is a blessedly empty bed and blessedly clean sheets.

Distantly, he realizes someone is tugging off his boots, that a warm tenor voice is clucking about his inability to hold his liquor and his general over-readiness to trust to random strangers to care for him. But something in him knows it's Zevran, and despite everything he trusts Zevran, and that Zevran is here and saying nice things and not shouting at him is sign enough that he's safe. He closes his eyes, feels a body thump to the bed beside him.

"Good night, Zevran," he mumbles into the pillow.

He's not sure, but he thinks Zevran says _good night_ too. He finds the assassin's warmth surprisingly comforting; he pats Zevran's shoulder twice, and with a sigh, he goes to sleep.

* * *

**Characters/Pairing:** Carver, Eppie Hawke  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 633  
 **Prompt:** from riana-one: "If you are taking requests… Carver becoming a templar and the awkward reconnection with his sister after the deep roads."

—

"You bloody _idiot_ ," his sister snaps, and it's all Carver can do not to throw that damned Templar sword right at her. "How could you do something like this to Mother?"

"To _Mother_?" he retorts, just as hot, as if their mother isn't standing right there with her hands over her mouth, betrayal plainer in her face than his sister's. "What about you? When was the last time you even ate a meal here? Or have you lost track of your _family_ in your stupid hunt for fame?"

"Fame!" Eppie screeches, because she won't be Hawke to him no matter what everyone calls her, no matter what she calls herself. He's seen her face-down in mud; he's seen her bawling her eyes out as their father pulled out a splinter; he's seen her embarrassed to hold that boy's hand, the blacksmith's son in Lothering. Their _father_ was Hawke; she doesn't deserve the name. Not yet. "What makes you think I give a flying nug about _fame_?"

He spreads his hands, the templar gauntlets weighted and unfamiliar, silver and shining in the smoky torchlight of Gamlen's home. "What else am I supposed to think? So busy building yourself up that you haven't got time for us little people anymore?"

"You little ass," his sister says, seething, and when she smacks his armor with the flat of her hand he sneers.

"Can't feel it, _sister_. Armor, you know."

"I know you're being a pompous prick, and if you try to smite me I'll smoke you so hard your toes'll curl."

He snorts, brushing her away like a cloud of gnats, and looks to where their mother stands statue-still with dismay. _That_ unsettles him, more than Eppie's disapprobation ever could; he takes her hands as gently as he can, considering he can't feel them through steel, and bends his head. "It's better this way, don't you see? If Kirkwall's Gallows is so broken, someone's got to work on it from the inside out. And sometimes…I dunno. I think it's got to be me."

"Oh, _Carver,_ " his mother sighs, but she squeezes his hands hard enough he can feel it, and that's enough.

So. Nothing left but his sister, still steaming with righteous indignation by the door.

"Well?" she asks, defiance and challenge in one as she crosses her arms. "Nothing more to say for yourself?"

He rolls his eyes. "It's long past any time I had to defend myself to you, sister."

Her lip curls, a hard sort of hurt flashing behind her eyes. "Well. At least you've got your great big sword to protect you, then. I hope it tells jokes."

"Better than yours," he snaps, shoving past her to pick up his pack by the door. Eppie's quiet as he arranges it, fiddling with the strap over his shoulder, fumbling the weight of it to sit just so at his hip. Perhaps he—perhaps this, after all this time—

No. He's made his choice.

"Well," his sister says at last, still stiff, still oddly strained. "Say hi to Keran for me, I suppose."

Carver nods, short and sharp, and turns to look at her. Not for the last time, he knows, but—he's glad, somehow, that they're solid enough that some things can still go unsaid. He won't turn her in. Better still, she knows it, knows that even now with all the bitter animosity between them that she's got his trust all the same. She's got his, and—

He's got hers.

"Well," he echoes, and for only an instant her eyes drop to the Templar blade emblazoned on his chest. Only an instant—and her eyes are back on his, blue as his, as their father's. "Take care of Mother."

"Of course," Eppie says softly, and then Carver opens the door, and is gone.


	29. Fenris, On Writing (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1100  
 **Prompt:** from lilou-approves: " _20\. Go nuts, and talk about writing. Or write me a little ficlet-whatsit using a character/image/line I shall now specify: Fenris/Hawke._ How about a ficlet about Fenris writing, then? :D"

—

He did not enjoy writing. It was not a skill that came easily to him, and while he was no stranger to effort, nor to the hours of dedicated focus in pursuit of some new proficiency, he _was_ unused to a practice that despite every effort showed him no _improvement._

The nib snapped—the third in as many hours—and Fenris threw the pen to the desk with enough force to spatter ink. Not that it mattered; his page was a mess of misspelled words, a heavy smear across the middle where he'd forgotten to blot the paper, his lines uneven, curving upwards and downwards and running into each other so that the letters cramped and shrank to nothing. A full sheaf done like this, and a dozen sheaves before them—and all of them the same, all useless, all the unformed, shaky script of a child and as illegible.

He cursed aloud, a childish thing despite the profanity, and barely caught his ink-wet fingers before they raked through his hair. Hawke stirred in one of the faded armchairs before the window and said, thick with sleep, "There's another in the box."

"A waste of silver," he snarled, aware of his own distemper, incapable of suppressing it. "Better to have let it line Isabela's pockets."

"Isabela," Hawke said evenly, sounding more awake, "does not have pockets. And even if she did, no coin would stay there long. Perhaps you ought to take a break."

"Nothing will be solved by stopping the exercise."

"And nothing will be _gained_ by you sitting there glaring like you've been copying Anders's manifesto instead of _Hard in Hightown_. Take a break. Walk around a little. Stare out the broken windows at the neighbors for a little while."

"Look at this," he snapped, snatching the page from the desk, stalking across the room to her chair where she sat in its high-backed shadow. He thrust it into her hands; embarrassed, furious, he said, "There is no reason to continue this farce. You waste your time and mine."

Hawke said nothing, looking at him for a stretching moment and then at the page, her eyes, dimmed by shade, flicking across the words he had scrawled there. A child's hand, he thought, closing his eyes, appalled at his own ignorance—he had seen Hawke's writing, looped and slanted and even; Varric's short, square letters, a frustrating mix of unnecessary capitals and abbreviations and yet entirely readable; and Anders's sharp, determined script marching line after line after line, close and straight and bold and _sure_ , as if the blackness of the ink alone might sway his readers into action.

And him, no letter formed the same way twice, tight and too pointed and so _difficult_ , even now, even after so many months. He curled his stained fingers into a fist.

He _itched_ for a sword. There, he knew grace; there was skill made by nothing more than his will and his determination and a decade of discipline. There, he knew every shift of muscle, every bending joint, every motion entirely under his command in the way that a pen _never_ was—

At last, Hawke lifted her eyes. "Fenris, I don't understand the problem."

He laughed, a hard, impatient thing. "No? You see no problem with this— _scrawl_?"

"So you have terrible handwriting. I can read every word."

"Every word. Spelled for me by _Varric,_ because despite four months of these— _lessons—_ I can't remember even the _simplest_ rules of—"

He cut himself off, whirling in place, his chest hot with frustration. He heard Hawke rise, felt the shift of air as she drew near, and hesitated, and withdrew; then she said, a curious note in her voice, "I'll be back in a moment. Don't go anywhere. And _don't_ try burn that book again, if you don't mind."

"I will make no promises," he said shortly, and knew the promise made all the same.

She was not gone long, no more than ten minutes—long enough for him to screw up his courage with a new pen-nib, or sheer stubbornness, or his unwillingness to accept defeat, even now. Hawke found him with one new line across the top the page, no less untidy but perhaps a little straighter, and when he lowered the pen she dropped a flat brown-wrapped package on the desk before him. He lifted his eyebrows; she shrugged, and when she made no move to stop him Fenris untied the twine that bound it, unfolded the thick brown paper in careful layers until its contents lay bare.

Letters. All opened, all old, the pages yellowed and too fragile at the creases. He touched the topmost gingerly, sliding his fingers beneath the folds until it opened, petal-like, to the quiet of the room.

"My father," said Hawke, low, "wrote these to my mother when they were courting."

He could read that. The first word, the letters narrow and tipped sideways, the capital too large for the rest: _Leandra—_

And then—

"Hawke," he said, "I cannot read this."

"Neither could my mother," she said, and he touched the smeared ink, the words run together three and four at once, letters made more by suggestion than real shape. He caught a word here and there— _dearest, tomorrow, gold—_ and then Hawke flattened her hand to the desk beside him, and he saw that beneath her fingers lay his own page, his own crooked lines twinned by the letter he held. "Yours," she added, "at least has the benefit of legibility."

He looked up to her wry smile, to the shift of her shoulders. "Hawke. You did not have to show me this."

"I've never met a man so driven to such unreasonable perfection as you. Sometimes your standards are impossible. Even for yourself."

Fenris hesitated. The words caught on his tongue, tight and prickling and difficult to shape. "I have seen—an example. A standard." He drew a breath. "Your standard. I wish—to match it."

She grew very still, her eyes wide and startled. The back of his neck flushed with embarrassment; then all at once she softened, and slid both his page and her father's letter away to lay a new, fresh sheet in their place, still unmarked by ink or thought, no error and no life to it. Yet.

She said, "Then let's find a place to start," and, nodding, he lifted the pen.


	30. Adaptation (Varania, Hawke/Fenris)

**AN:** Not written for any particular prompt, but rather in response to tagged hate in Varania's tag on Tumblr. She may be a prickly stubborn complicated elf, but I love her. So there.

* * *

**Characters/Pairing:** Varania, Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 800  
 **Notes:** Set after the events of my fic Ascendi, in which Varania's assistance becomes necessary to rescue Hawke from Danarius's last trap.

—

"Pass," said her brother, in quiet Arcanum, "to the left."

Varania paused, her fingers just brushing the platter of lamb. "What?"

"When you have taken what you wish, pass the dish to the left. Until everyone has been served."

Varania flicked her eyes from her brother to the woman across from her, a tall, sturdy Fereldan with orange hair and a square jaw and shoulders made for heavy steel. As she finished spooning the spiced, roasted potatoes to her own plate, her sideburned husband took the dish from her; even before it had left her hands she had already turned for the bowl of vegetables at her other side.

Varania speared a small piece of lamb, slid it awkwardly to her plate with the thin gold chasing around its rim. The gold flashed briefly in the bright sunlight streaming through the tall windows above the table; without smiling, her brother said, "You may take more."

The words slipped out without thought. "I do not like too much meat."

"As you like," he told her, inclining his head, and handed her the little tray of sweet tomatoes.

She ate silently, pleased despite herself at the meal. The slave who had prepared it served it also, a small thing with wide eyes who knew her place, who knew _Varania_ ' _s_ place at the mistress's table, even if the people in this room used other words for it. Orana, her brother had called her, when the Champion still had not arrived by lunch and he had taken her duties. Varania did not watch her leave.

She had enough to occupy her mind as it was. The guard-captain and her husband spoke easily, affectionately, as if they did not care who saw them—and her brother spoke easily _to_ them, in a friendship she could not understand. No slave lived so close to the city's law by choice; no slave smiled at the guard-captain's embarrassment over her dropped fork and did not suffer. The implications unnerved her.

"Is it to your liking?" her brother asked. In the trade tongue—no hiding from that. The guard-captain and her husband looked up expectantly.

Their eyes were a heavy weight on her chest, crushing away her air. She licked her lips. "Yes. It is excellent."

"More wine?"

She could not read his face. A test? "No. Thank you."

A pause; then the guard-captain—Aveline, she reminded herself with effort—leaned forward. "So how have you found Kirkwall so far?"

"Very…" she hesitated. "Not as I expected."

"I understand. It was the same when I came. Have you settled in yet?"

Varania glanced sideways; her brother studiously avoided her eyes, though she could see amusement in his mouth. She did not know how much to say. "There was… ah—"

"There may," her brother said, reluctant rescue, "have been a mouse."

Her mouth twitched. "A rat!"

"Regardless. It is no more."

A boundless capacity for understatement. Varania laughed, startling herself, then hid it behind her fingers. Her brother smiled again. Embarrassed, she added, "Neither are your curtains."

The guardsman Donnic chuckled. "I'm amazed you only found the one, considering the state of that place."

"I am not so untidy as you think."

"Whatever you say, Fenris."

The name still struck her _wrong—_ but before she could speak voices rose in the great hall, loud and cheerful and growing nearer. The familiar pull of magic prickled at the back of her neck and she fought the urge to stand, to lower her eyes; then the door burst open, and there was no time to do either.

"Hello!" cried Hawke, laughing, her eyes bright, her hair wind-tousled. The pirate strode in behind her, just as exuberant, and flung herself into the empty chair at the head of the table with a gusting sigh. "You started without us!"

"You were _late_ ," Aveline told her tartly, already handing the potatoes to Isabela. Hawke laughed again, approaching Fenris's chair; when he looked up and back she leant down, gripping his shoulders, and kissed him directly on the mouth.

"Raiders don't keep to a schedule. Besides," she added, straightening, no blush on her cheeks—or on her brother's, though he hid his smile as soon as it came, and something in her heart ached— "It's my house! Look! My table. My _plates._ My—lovely, beautiful Orana—"

"Don't!" Orana cried, twisting away from Hawke, barely keeping hold of the clean plates and glasses without disaster. The Champion relented, allowing her to lay the new places; then, sudden enough Varania blinked, she dropped her hand on Varania's shoulder in companionable greeting as she sank into the empty chair at her left.

"Flames, I'm _starving_. Who's got the lamb?"

Isabela gave the platter to Fenris, who handed it to Varania; she paused only a moment to take a second piece for herself, and then she passed the plate left to Hawke, who thanked her.


	31. AU Meme: 1940s Noir (Hawke & Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 1200  
 **Notes:** Not for any specific prompt; rather, I was inspired by some fanart of a grumpy Fenris in a dapper 1940s style hat. I wrote the first section as a little tag on that piece; then, at an anon's request, I borrowed jillyfae's magnificent Dragon Age mafia world to expand it a little further.

Fanart, by needlesslycryptic, [here](http://loquaciousquark.tumblr.com/post/85544111017/needlesslycryptic-quick-fenris-in-a-hat).  
Jilly's original AU [here](http://archiveofourown.org/chapters/3217046).

—

I knew the man was trouble when he walked in.

Not that I saw him enter—the first inkling I had that I wasn't alone in my office in the middle of the night was the cold smooth barrel of a Smith & Wesson sliding tenderly under my right ear. Not the _friendliest_ greeting I've ever had, but when you're a struggling private eye in one of the seediest districts in a seedier city, you take the jobs you get. Varric would've said I deserved it. Isabela would've said I _enjoyed_ it.

But hey, steel muzzle tickling my jaw, I wasn't going to complain—not where the guy could hear me, anyway. I turned real slow, hands up, not even looking down at the glass of whiskey holding my notes from my last case in place on the desk. I couldn't see his face properly in the dim streetlights slatting through my blinds, dark skin even darker with how low his hat was jammed over his face. Then he stepped forward into the little pool of light spilling out of my desk lamp to get the gun back against my neck, and I couldn't help but sigh.

Isabela was right about the nose for trouble. I've always had a weakness for big sad green eyes.

—

A dime novel would've called him a leggy blond with soulful eyes, but I figured I should stick to _Fenris,_ at least until he put the gun away. He had a jaw like an anvil and a voice that purred smooth as a Cadillac, and a trigger finger itchy enough to keep me safe on my side of the desk.

He had a penchant for lurking, too. Once I got him off the subject of introductions—namely, concerning his revolver and my face—he loosened up just enough for me to think his shoulders might be a little more flexible than marble. He stuck to the shadows of the room like a hunted rat, pacing side to side; I stayed where I was, both hands on the desk, wondering if he was the kind of man to shoot someone over a drink.

Most people were in my business, I'd found, but we weren't getting anywhere like this. I picked up my glass, nice and slow. He twitched a little, like a stranger had just tickled his toes, but it kept his eyes on the drink and not my other hand, sliding open the lap drawer in the desk where I kept my own special companion: a .38 special with a custom grip, to be exact. The whiskey was warm all the way down, and when the glass was empty I tipped it in his direction.

"I am not thirsty," he said, proving us both liars, but Kirkwall was made of lies and one more couldn't make much difference.

I left the bottle on the desk anyway, sitting in the little pool of light spilling out of the one lit lamp in the dark room. "Fine by me," I said, sweet as sugar, and set the empty glass down on the notes for old lady Meredith's case again. Not my favorite job—I never liked going after runaways—but the battleaxe had friends in high places and I had friends in low ones, and when your brother's boss called in a favor it wasn't easy to say no. "You got a reason for the visit, or you just wanted to stare into my eyes?"

He made a noise like a steam-engine hissing and came closer, just enough I could see those deep greens under the brim of his hat again. "I was told you could…find people."

I wasn't one for playing cagey, but something told me this wasn't my typical philanderer. "Depends on who told you."

"I have a sister," he said, desperate-like, and then before I knew it he was spilling out the whole sordid story. It _wasn't_ my usual fare, full of twisted experiments and an Italian madman and a hostage nobody was sure even needed to be rescued, but I didn't have any doubts I could get the guy his sister back until he dropped a name like a gallon of icewater on me right at the end.

" _Le Monstre_ ," I said, shaking my head, and sat down again behind my desk. The chair creaked dangerously as I leaned back, but it'd been doing that for years and hadn't broken yet. I hoped this wasn't going to be a day of firsts. "Sorry, pal. You'll have to find someone else."

"There is no one else," he growled, and for the first time I got a real sense of how this guy might be dangerous too. He smoothed a hand over his jacket, his mind obviously a million miles away; then he snapped back like Indian rubber and stalked fast enough towards me I reached for the .38. He stopped just as my fingers curled around steel, his fists coming knuckle-down on the far side of the desk, making the cheap gold whiskey dance in its bottle. "I tell you, _no one_ else will help me."

"I don't care if she's _my_ sister. Any friend of _Le Monstre_ 's off-limits."

"Danarius is not his _friend_. He is—a business associate. A _distant_ associate."

"You're a damn poor liar."

He swore in some language I didn't know, then tore off his hat with one hand and reached into his suit-jacket with the other. The .38 leapt to my hand like it was born there, aimed square between his eyes—he froze, just for a second, and then just as slow as I'd moved earlier, he pulled out a fat stack of greenbacks and tossed it to the desk between us. Enough to feed Beth and my mother for a month, easy. Better money than I'd seen in years.

"It's all I have," he snarled, and then he leaned forward into the light of the lamp at last, close enough I could see the ink on his chin. His hair wasn't even blond—white as china where it fell over his face, and his eyes even greener than I'd expected. Desperate and angry and even worse, flickering with hope. "I need your help."

He might as well have played me like a piano. I sighed, set the gun back in its drawer, and reached for the whiskey again. Cheap as sin and burned all the way down, and this time when I offered him the bottle, he took it. Suspicious, and he coughed when he swallowed, but it was enough for me to figure out how far I'd gone over the edge already.

"Pull up a chair, wise guy," I told him, already weary from how many sleepness nights I was about to get myself, and reached for the folder of blank contracts my secretary Orana had drawn up ages ago. "I'll take the case."


	32. AU Meme: Secret Spy (Hawke & Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** PG  
 **Word Count:** 3500  
 **Notes:** Kind of a long set-up for this one. In essence, servantofclio made an awesome post about writing what you want, I reblogged it and added something goofy about pretend marriage telepathic secret spy AUs, and then silksieve told me to write it and this happened.

 **Original Notes:** This isn't exactly telepathic, but it's the best I can do under the circumstances. It's also not _quite_ as I'd imagined it in my head, but I don't think it's ever going to be anything more than what it is, and I don't want to invest a thousand hours into research and remodeling when I have giveaway fics still tap-tap-tapping at my chamber door.

So anyway, here. Have 3500 words of tropey unresearched unbetaed goofy fluffy Fenris/Hawke secret spy pretend marriage, because how could I _not?_

—

She can't get his voice out of her head.

Figuratively, that is, which is part of her damned _problem_. For someone who ought to be desperately in love Fenris is standoffish as an iceberg, and even the small comms they've had tucked into their ears since before she'd arrived at the airport hotel haven't transmitted a sound except an occasional deep, annoyed mutter. It'd been bad enough when her handler had let her into one of the hotel's tiny rooms near midnight—Varric gives her the worst shit-eating grin she'd ever seen when he opens the door to let her in—and _then_ she sees this so-called Fenris behind him, perched on the edge of the perfectly-made bed: freshly-dyed black hair, bizarre tattoos, crossed arms, a scowl dark enough to crack glass. The silence lasts all of two seconds before he starts _talking_ , and even though he's so irritated at the whole situation he lapses into Italian twice Hawke can't muster the slightest inclination to stop him.

That his accent is spine-meltingly smooth doesn't hurt, either, even if his Italian curses are rather more vivid than his English ones.

But Fenris's anger tapers off behind cold control soon enough, and he doesn't offer another word as Varric registers their comm frequencies and distributes both new passports and a sizeable sum of miscellaneous currency. He doesn't even say goodbye when Varric leaves them to it near one in the morning, still grinning like an ass; instead he only takes the one small bag allowed him into the tiny bathroom adjacent and starts a shower hot enough that even through the closed door Hawke's hair begins to curl. When it becomes apparent he has no intention of joining her anytime soon—in their one bed or otherwise—she gives up on conversation, checks the locks on the windows and doors twice, and crawls under the covers. Cheap hotel sheets, lumpy hotel pillows, grumpy handsome man in her hotel shower…

_Stop it. Idiot._

Her training keeps her from real sleep with a stranger so close, but she manages to coax herself to a light doze for almost an hour before she hears the water cut off. She'd left the small bedside lamp on for his sake—even a master-class spy with a penchant for punnery had the occasional consideration for the stubbing of bare toes—and she cracks an eye to watch him as he crosses the dim room, still scowling, his damp black hair still dripping, his tailored button-up replaced with a soft, long-sleeved shirt and sleeping pants two inches too long.

He doesn't stub his toe. Instead he drops his bag in front of the dark television, glances once at the empty place in the bed—and at Hawke, watching quietly—and then crams himself into the faux-leather armchair next to the room's overworked air conditioning unit.

Fine. She turns out the light and rolls to her other side, unconcerned with his determination to pull every muscle in his back. He's not the one playing bodyguard, after all.

He shifts twice during the night. She gets up the second time, throws one of the bed's extra blankets over his shoulders. His eyes fly open, instant and wide and _terrified_ —then in the space of a second it becomes embarrassment, and anger, and—nothing. His hands curl around the blanket's edge; she takes herself back to bed.

She's seen that hunted look before.

—

The morning, however, brings little improvement to their relationship. Fenris scowls through her morning workout, scowls through their room-service breakfast, scowls as she lays out, step by step, her rather meticulously-organized briefing on how she plans to keep him alive, considering he's the current target of organizations in power so long they've become dynasties. Three words she manages to eke out ("no," "no," and " _no_ ") between him changing back into the button-down (achieved in the bedroom, while she's blow-drying her hair), Hawke herself changing into her neat, unremarkable vest and dark jeans (also in the bedroom, after he goes back to the hall mirror for the third time to frown at his black hair). Then she slings her duffel over one shoulder as she tosses him the other, and all that's left is—

"Here comes the bride," she says, and holds out her hand palm-up to Fenris.

He grimaces. Three rings between the two of them: an engagement diamond and two silver bands, one wider than the other. There's a long, stretching moment where she thinks he's about to protest; then at her look he snatches the man's band with a muttered curse and shoves it onto his fourth finger, where it glints oddly against the silver tattoos. Processed, refined lyrium, those, the gross domestic product of a small country—and embedded in his wrist a microscopic datachip with enough of Danarius's secrets to endanger six of Interpol's most wanted.

Hawke grins and slides on her own rings, impressed despite herself at Varric's taste. "I can hear the bells chiming already. Ready, darling?"

"Don't."

"Don't what?"

"Call me such things." His knuckles are so tight around his bag's strap that the tendons have pulled tight under the skin. "My name is Fenris."

"Fenris," she repeats, and tucks her arm through his, sidling close enough she can feel him stiffen head to toe. "You can call me whatever you like, so long as you don't get yourself killed."

"I don't intend to die."

"I don't intend to let you." Hawke grins at his glare, drops a quick kiss on his cheek. "Just relax. We're a couple of honeymooners in the middle of wedding season. All you have to do is put up with a little harmless affection in public; as soon as we get you to the London office you can be as prickly as you like."

A muscle jumps in his jaw as he looks away, but a moment later she feels his stiffness cave with his resistance. "Fine. Do what you must."

She opens the door to the hotel's narrow, brightly-carpeted hallway, laughing as she tugs him after her. "A happy marriage already."

—

If nothing else, he's easy on the eyes. And sturdy, too; she leans on him just a little more than is polite as they work their way through the terminals, glancing up through her eyelashes and smiling every time he frowns. More than once she has to link her fingers through his as he reaches up to scratch his chin; Merrill's disguise tech is weightless and wafer-thin and visually impeccable—she'd started teaching herself in the mirror when she was ten—but the adhesive around the edges is always itchy as hell the first hour or so. She checks the boards in absent habit as they pass, tracking the departing flights for secondary and tertiary escape routes if necessary. Amsterdam, Beijing, Honolulu.

"I wish we were going to Hawaii," she says when they take their seats at last in the terminal's flimsy rows of chairs. Terminal N-7: the absolute farthest walk from the hotel possible. Of course.

"Why?"

"Why not? It's tropical, it's beautiful, it's isolated. And I have some friends there."

He glances over his shoulder at the racket of a toppling suitcase, his eyebrows furrowed, but when Hawke follows his gaze she sees nothing out of the ordinary save a short, red-bearded man sneaking a drink from a flask behind one of the sunglasses kiosks. Fenris closes his eyes, shakes his head; then he says, "I suspect you have friends in most places."

"It happens in this business. They either kill you in the first strike, or you start going to movies together every Saturday as soon as everyone's out of hospital." More than that, if Zev had had his way—

He snorts. "How trustworthy."

"Well, you know. Different strokes." An older woman with grey hair pulled back in a bun is watching them benevolently from the terminal's check-in desk; Hawke turns her whole body towards Fenris, propping her chin on her hand as she leans close enough to him to feel the air change. "Don't tell me you've never wanted to lie back on a white beach with a breeze blowing through your hair, a fruity drink loaded with tequila, and a tiny little umbrella to stir it with."

If she hadn't been so close she'd never have seen it. The corner of his mouth twitches up in just the barest hint of amusement; then it is gone again, though not before Hawke's own grin widens. Fenris sees her smile and looks away, his mouth opening, but he is saved by the last second by their call to board. Right on time, as expected.

"Come on," Hawke says, relenting, and pats his shoulder as she stands. "Let's get this show in the air."

—

It's the knuckles that give him away. His shoulders are loose, his face calm—and his fingers are noticeably white around the armrest as the plane taxis forward onto the runway. Hawke ignores it at first, as he's clearly sensitive about her… well, noticing things, but when the plane's engines open throttle and his knuckles honest-to-goodness _creak,_ she can't help but cover his hand with her own and offer the most encouraging look she has. It helps that business class runs only two seats wide on the window side of the aisle, giving them a modicum of privacy; as it is, the older woman with the bun across the way already has out her reading glasses and her book, a romance novel from last year Hawke had read on one of the worst stakeouts she'd ever had.

She closes her eyes at the thought, letting out a breath at the memory of Chateau Haine. She still has some of the scars from that wyvern-genetic-experiment-thing's acid teeth. Some things were just _not_ meant to exist.

Regardless, both she and Fenris survive the plane's ascent to cruising altitude, and by the time they level out most of the color's come back to Fenris's face. He even masters himself enough to give her a brief nod of thanks, which Hawke figures is at least step one in Maintaining a Healthy Fake Relationship With One's Fake Spouse. She squeezes his hand once, then lets go. "You think you'll make it?"

"I imagine so."

"Bad flight, once? Or just a general fear?"

"Both." He looks as if he'd like to end the conversation there, but when Hawke offers a smile warm enough to make a bachelor blush he sighs and drops his voice. "I have never liked the idea. Then my first flight… truthfully, I don't remember much of it. I was sedated for the most part. I only remember a great deal of turbulence worsening every injury I already had."

Hawke lifts an eyebrow, drawing her thumbnail in a short line from the center of her chin down her throat. Fenris's lip curls as he continues. "Just so. The facility had been compromised, and D— my former master was forced to abandon it. I, of course, was brought along."

He looks so _bitter._ She'd like to say—something, but just as she starts to speak the seatbelt light above the cabin doors flicks off, and that's her cue. Fenris lifts his eyebrow as she unbuckles and leans over to kiss his cheek again; when she pulls back she tugs playfully on his ear. "I'm going to stretch my legs a moment. Don't go anywhere."

His jaw tightens, and when she unbuckles her seatbelt he turns away from her to the tiny square window at his elbow. "I'll be right back," she tells him more softly, meaning it, regretting his anger. "And, for what it's worth—thanks for telling me."

He doesn't look at her. But he nods, short and sharp, and when she looks back his hands have begun to relax around the armrests.

—

"Test, test, one two three."

 _"What?"_ Fenris snaps, and Hawke grins. She's never heard a whisper so ferocious before.

"Just checking. All clear in the cargo bay."

 _"Stop it._ " He pauses, and Hawke can practically see him readjusting himself to look more unapproachable than he already is, mouth hidden behind his fist, glaring out the window at farmland thirty-seven thousand feet below. " _This is the third time._ "

She zips up the beaten leather suitcase, then stands, stretching her back. "Someone's got a thing for lace. Anyway, maybe I just missed your voice, oh husband mine."

An inarticulate noise of disgust. " _This_ farce _._ "

Hawke grins again, wading through luggage to the narrow access ladder on the far wall. She'd timed it with the airline attendants' dispersal of overpriced snacks and lukewarm sodas; she still has two and a half minutes before they return to their tiny cordoned pantry in the back. Plenty of time. "I told you. The agency wanted the best for you, so you got me. And my best alias has been engaged for three years." She grips the ladder, swings herself up. "And since _you_ happen to be both the right age and gender for her fiancé—congratulations to the both of us."

There's a distant, tinny greeting in her ear as the airline attendant hands Fenris his…whatever drink he's chosen. Something alcoholic, probably. He doesn't thank her where Hawke can hear it—she can imagine the terse nod clearly enough anyway—but as the squeaky wheels of the pushcart go silent Fenris speaks again. There's nothing but cold concentration in his voice now, even if the volume's barely above a breath.

" _That woman had a button camera on her jacket._ "

Hawke goes still on the ladder. "Are you sure?"

" _Yes. I saw it first; then I heard the shutter._ "

"Shit."

" _Yes_."

"Nothing flagged on the manifest from this morning. I'll double-check. Sit tight."

Silence, as expected. Hawke hooks an ankle around the ladder's spindly uprights and pulls out her phone. Ninety seconds. A bit of Anders's tech lets her get into the records; a few moments later, she's filtered out all passengers with tickets booked more than two days before the flight, when their own tickets had been purchased. Eight names out of a hundred and fifty. Two of them are hers and Fenris's; two another married couple, the other four apparently unconnected. She pulls up their records, grateful for the airline's decent Wi-Fi, and realizes what the grating sound in her ear is. "Stop grinding your teeth."

He makes another noise of frustration, but stops. Then, a second later: " _She's coming back_."

"Stay calm. I'm on my way." Forty seconds. A well-known businesswoman, an artist, a divorcee with two small children, _nothing_ —she just needs a little more time—

His voice is edged. " _Hawke—_ "

She knows the face the instant it pops onto her phone's screen. _Damn it. Damn, damn, damn—_ "I've got it. ETA twenty seconds."

" _Do you need a refill?_ " The woman's voice, professional, perfectly solicitous.

" _No_ ," Fenris says in her ear, just low enough she almost misses it behind the creak of the hatch over her head. The attendants' nook is empty, the curtain still drawn just as she'd left it; Hawke takes the precious two seconds to smooth her hair back and dust off her jeans, and then she's through the curtain and closing the cracked bathroom door to her left with a slap. The aisle's clear all the way to business class, dozens of heads all facing forward, dark and blonde and red and in the distance one single silver, turned to the lovely airline attendant leaning towards him over Hawke's empty seat.

She can see the woman's lips moving with her words, the comm in her ear barely carrying the thin sound. " _Are you sure? You don't look too good_."

"I'm fine." Close enough to hear that one with her own ears—

She doesn't run. She's very proud of that. She manages one quick whisper: "Going to kiss you, please don't kill me—" and sees Fenris's eyes flick back towards her, and then she's sliding between the attendant and the armrest into her empty seat and her hand's on Fenris's shoulder as she leans in, and she's kissing him.

It's not long, not intimate, nothing inappropriate for a public place. It's still as familiar as she can make it between two near-total strangers, though to his credit Fenris neither flinches nor tries to hit her, and he doesn't pull away until she does. All in all, it's a pretty good kiss for someone who's been complaining in her head for the last ten minutes.

"Welcome back," he says, and she just barely suppresses the eyebrow trying to shoot into her hairline. That's not bad either, for an amateur.

Instead she says, "Thanks," and offers him one of her best crooked smiles, and then she looks up at the woman still waiting in the aisle. "Sorry, was I interrupting something?"

"Just thought your husband might like another drink. He wasn't looking well."

"Oh?" She glances over. "Are you all right, honey?"

His eyes close as he turns to the window, and Hawke bites down hard on the inside of her cheek. "I'm _fine_."

"If you say so. Actually, I'll take a bottled water, if you've got one."

It's four damn euro, but she does, and once she hands it off the attendant vanishes into the back with the pushcart. Hawke settles back into her seat, annoyed at her own pulse's racing as she opens the bottle; Fenris glances at her from the corner of his eye, silently, but she can hear the question loud as a bell.

She unfolds her hand between them in answer. In her palm, black and pristine and still clicking away happily, lies the attendant's button cam.

—

"What are you doing?" Fenris hisses, and Hawke clamps a hand over his mouth.

"Shush."

He grips her by the wrist—and he's _strong_ , stronger than she'd realized—and drags her hand away. "We should leave. _Now_."

"We will," Hawke insists, and flattens them both into the nook in the shadows just inside the terminal's exit. They're hidden in a small recessed hallway, meant for the employees-only maintenance door behind them; the rest of the passengers stream by to Hawke's left, unbroken, entirely uninterested in the pair of tired travelers taking a breather out of the line of traffic.

"If you mean to kill me—"

"Then I'd have done it last night while you were giving yourself the back cramps from hell. Stop _talking_."

He snarls in Italian _,_ his jaw tightening enough she can hear his teeth grind again, but he doesn't try to leave a second time as the flow of passengers begins to slacken, then drops away altogether. A few minutes more and two of the attendants pass by, then three, then four—and at last the pilot and copilot, laughing about some coworker's rough flight that morning.

Then silence.

Fenris is stiff as a poker beside her. Hawke puts a calming hand on his wrist and considers it a victory he doesn't shove her away—and at last, just as the distant mechanical whine warns them the covered walkway is being retracted, she hears the click of high heels echoing down the hall's laminate tile.

They stop just before her branching hallway, just so that Hawke can see the flash of long, brown leg, the uniform's skirt slid two inches too high for regulation. "Hello, sweet thing," says the airline attendant.

Hawke grins despite herself and steps into the light, flicking the button cam into the air between them. "Hello, Isabela."

"Good to see you too." She catches the cam without looking, tossing her dark hair over her shoulder, and gives Fenris a brilliant smile. "And if you two'd like to survive the next twenty-four hours—which I think you would—you'd better come with me."

—


	33. Grief, Reprise (Hawke & Fenris)

**AN:** Doubling up once again, as both of these are relatively short.

* * *

 **Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 900  
 **Notes:** Anonymous asked: What's your saddest Fenris headcanon? (I don't know why I'm asking this, god, curiosity is going to kill me)

—

_You weren't always this way, Fenris. Once upon a time you had affection for me. I remember it fondly._

—

There are, when he forget to guard himself, things he misses from Tevinter.

It is not only the easy memories, the spices and the rich smells and the sight of a bazaar dripping with silks. Nor is it the welcome dry heat of Minrathous summers lost to this new bitter chill of Kirkwall, every season made shorter by thick winds off the Waking Sea and the walls of Hightown towering over all below. It would not be so hard to ward himself if it were.

Instead he startles at the market, when he emerges from his thoughts to realize the language spoken here is foreign and hard, that there is not a soul in a hundred miles who would welcome his mother tongue were he to offer it at all. Instead he looks at the dusty cellar of Hawke's estate with the wine-racks draped with cobwebs, and he remembers the cool stone floors of Danarius's estate, the bottles gleaming, lined one by one on the shelves with absolute precision and care. He looks at the squabbling, petty nobles in the Viscount's faded antechambers and he remembers the silent arches of the Archon's palace, white marble sweeping high above his head into perfect dimness, carved faces silent and stern where they stared from every wall, where they knew those who begged favor to be unworthy. He looks at the rough unfinished hexes of Lowtown and he remembers the harder, beautiful avenues that cut through the high cities, olive trees throwing gentle silvered shade on the magisters' silk-soft palanquins, their skin softer still from their magic. They had been a sea of their own, the trees, winds from the sea blowing them into an endless sigh that welcomed him at every passing.

He stops himself when he can, when he remembers that that life is done and has no place in his memories that is not loathing. He was a slave. He was their _slave_. He should not—

He forces himself to remember the worst times, the moments he was weakest then as shield against the moments he is weakest now. The beatings are easiest to draw to his mind, the few times his back was torn to bleeding by an impassive whip, the sharper blows of a hand at smaller offenses; and the nights with Hadriana, sinuous whispers in his sleep and in his soul, speaking lies until he snapped; and the biting thoughts of Danarius's rooms and Danarius's bed, where there was less pain and more humiliation and neither punishment nor reward, only endurance.

Hate this, he tells himself. Hate them and everything they've done, and wonder why the hate consumes you—

(It is hard to hate the memory of pride glowing in his chest, his master's eyes fond on him and his master's hand gentle on his back. It is hard to hate the remembered satisfaction of knowing his own skill and his mastery of his own self _perfect_ , of the knowledge that he was of all his master's house the best, the strongest, the most-loved. It is hard to hate the only memories he has of happiness in those years, honest pleasure, when his head was on his master's knee and long nails stroked tenderly through his hair, down the spread of his shoulders where he bent them.)

(It is hard to hate a thing he knows he once loved more than life. It is harder to know his master had not been only cruel.)

Therefore—

Therefore he must be vigilant at all times. He must scorn the place he came from and the man he was when he lived there, because to do otherwise is to allow his master hold on his heart even now, even ten years running and the word _freedom_ in his mouth. He must despise Tevinter, think of it only with fury and rancor, vengeance held tight in his heart and hand.

Do not think of the two young boys in the far fields, laughing as he returned to them their lost ball, Danarius looking on indulgently. Do not think of the precious sweetmeats saved from the master's table for the kitchens, the sly grins as a chocolate was plucked from a platter and divided amongst those nearest before the rest was taken to table. Do not think of the silent dawns of the practice yard, where sweat was honest and his sword was heavy in his hand, his chest bare to the morning mist, breathless as the world slowly burned into life beneath Tevinter's sun.

No. He must kill the man he was, the one who knew the yoke and wore it proudly. To know freedom is to abhor the slave; how can he claim the word his own if he still harbors fondness for the chain? Make that self a shadow, black and without form, a thing to put at his back and never face.

It seems fitting, then, he thinks in those weakest moments, that it drags at his heels every moment, a weight he can never shake.

(He still, despite everything, loves the olive trees.)

* * *

 **Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Word Count:** 600  
 **Notes:** Anonymous asked: Hi, so, um, a little while ago you answered an anon ask about your thoughts on the level of reconciliation between Eppie and Fenris after All That Remains? And you mentioned that there were stolen kisses during that whole awkward three years. And I wondered if you had maybe any drabbles or ficlets or little notes-to-self lying around that you wanted to share (or have already shared somewhere)? Because *squee*. You are super and so is Eppie. I'm just going to crawl back under my rock now. <3

—

Fenris is not used to seeing Hawke bedridden. Mages in general, if he is honest; magisters tended to die quickly and brilliantly when their magic failed in battle, and few permitted themselves to linger through the indignity of long illness. But here Hawke lies, eyes bruised, bandaged shoulder to hip and held together by little more than stitches, Anders's desperate attempts to mitigate the damage of the Arishok's sword.

Sword, he thinks, and his lips twist. _Cleaver._

He does not move, but something in the quiet afternoon stirs Hawke to wakefulness. She blinks slowly, a confusion in her face that disquiets him with its strangeness, and her hand half-rises from the bedcovers before falling again. "Fenris?" she says, and slurs the word. She still has not looked at him.

"Hawke."

She blinks again; then her eyes clear on him where he sits in the wooden armchair pulled to her bedside, and her eyebrows lift in something like lucidity. "Am I still dreaming?"

Relief surges in his throat; he cannot help the smile. "Do all your dreams involve such suffering on your part?"

"Only most of the time," she says, but she grins to soften it. "How long have you been here?"

"Not long."

"Liar."

He shakes his head, leaning forward. With relief comes the memory of fear, and he can still see too clearly the horrifying juxtaposition of sword and skin, Hawke's limbs dangling doll-like into open air. "I was…concerned."

The touch of her hand on his knotted fingers startles him out of memory; at her clear concern he rises, bends over her as her hand lifts to his chest—to draw him nearer or push him away, he doesn't know. He only knows that she nearly died and he did nothing to stop it, and he cannot leave the words unsaid. Not this time. "You worried me, Hawke."

"I worried myself." Her fingers twitch on his shirt; her head shifts restlessly on the pillows. "I certainly didn't intend to get skewered, if that's any comfort."

"It is not."

Hawke rolls her eyes, but before she can voice whatever witticism is on her tongue Fenris moves his hand to her cheek, the backs of his fingers brushing carefully across her temple. "It is not," he says again, lower, surprised by his own boldness, and bends until his forehead touches hers. He needs to feel her warmth, to feel her breath and know—

She does not push him away; neither does she turn. Instead her hand clenches into his shirt for a long, stretching moment; then it slides to the back of his neck, and when she tugs he lets himself be moved, lets her angle her head against his until his nose bumps hers and her mouth glances over his own.

Not enough. He threads his fingers into her hair, carefully, bends nearer until he can kiss her properly and with as much care as he knows how to give. He does not stay—she is hurt and he is—hurting—and soon enough she releases him herself, drops her hand away, watches him slowly take his seat again at her side. His heart will not slow.

"I can't promise I won't do it again," she says at last, her eyes guarded, the bruises darkened by the sun streaming through her window.

Fenris laughs, shaky and unamused. "This?" he asks, gesturing between them, "or—the Arishok?"

"Either," Hawke says, and Fenris sighs. He expects no less; and he knows himself well enough to realize he will not stop her, either.

The conversation turns after that to safer things, but Fenris thinks of the way she gripped him for a long time.


	34. At the Door (Varania, Hawke/Fenris)

****Characters/Pairing:** ** Varania,Hawke/Fenris **  
 **Rating:**** G **  
 **Word Count:** ** 2100 **  
 **Notes:**** This is for servantofclio's challenge on Tumblr, where she provided the first sentence of a fic (composed by probablylostrightnow) to a bunch of different people to see what they'd come up with. I'm a little late, but this was so much fun!

* * *

 

She often wondered how her life would have been different if she'd opened that door.

More often in the earliest days, when she woke to rain or sleet or too-bright sun on her face and hands, given free rein by the holes and broken places of her brother's roof. More often too when she sat silently at his simple table with him twice a day, meat and bread made by other hands and brought to his house, fine silver unfamiliar in her hands and unfamiliar in her brother's skin. Leto had never been so stern.

He took her to the markets on the fourth day after his master died. The merchants knew his face if not his name, and deferred to his judgment, and when he gave her name to them as his sister Varania they nodded and said _a pleasure to meet you, friend of the Champion._ She laughed the last time, hard even to her ears, and when her brother looked at her she turned away.

A fine thing, to meet a merchant with no coin. A just cruelty.

But on the sixth day her brother came to her room and beckoned, and because no others had orders for her she followed him to a room in his west wing, less dusty than the others and with heavier wear, and watched as he knelt and pulled a strapped square chest from beneath a low bench. She looked to the side when he unlocked it, the rattle of the key too loud in the silence between them, and then she glanced again and he—

"What is this?" she asked stupidly, and the bag shifted in her hands with the weight. She knew the sound of gold at a distance.

"Yours," he said, pushing to his feet. "You said you came with nothing, and Danarius would not have cared to notice."

"But you do."

He lifted his chin. "I would not have you leashed here against your will."

She rolled the bag in her palms. Thick, sturdy canvas, rough against her callused fingertips, every shift marked with the truer ring of heavy gold. More than she had ever held; more, she thought, even than her employer in Qarinus might have made in a year. "And if I walked with this into the street, how long would the refuse here allow me to live?"

"The city is not safe after dark. If you must go out, it would be safer to take someone with you."

There was threat, there, but she could not read it. "Someone like you."

"Or Hawke."

She closed her eyes, turned away. "You are too generous."

"Varania," he said, sharp and hot, and she nearly flinched; instead she straightened her back against her brother's disappointment, the bite of a blow.

None came. She loosed a breath, eyes stinging, and said, "Have you anything else for me?"

He did not answer, not quickly, and she could not bear to see his face. He sighed, dismissal enough, and she fled; when she gained the dubious safety of her room she flung the bag at her feet where the string broke, and gold spilled out before her in fistfuls of heavy light on stone, the sunlight pouring through her broken roof to turn them all to drops of fire.

She left them there, afraid of burning.

—

On the tenth day he brought a man to her door. She knew him from the filthy inn where Danarius had died, recognized the heavy sideburns and the uniform of a guardsman; the familiarity did not check the sudden hard pounding of her heart in her throat or the cold sweat of her palms. There were few reasons strangers came to her in Tevinter, none pleasant, but she had not thought—

"Hallo," the man said, and bowed to her. "Sorry to bother you in the middle of the day, but Fenris asked for my help."

"Your help," she said, doubting. Her fingers clenched together at her waist, unfocused magic pricking at her palms. Her brother looked at her sharply—

Donnic lifted the hammer and nails in one hand, worked brass and iron in the other. His smile was kind. "He said you needed a lock."

She could not fight them both. The window served her instead, glimpses of freedom already trickling from her hands. So much for a leash. She should have known, she thought distantly, the clank of metal drowning out the low conversation at her back. Her brother, _Leto_ —no. Fenris. Her jailor. She should have realized there would be repercussions from her betrayal.

She had not expected them to ache so fiercely.

Less than ten minutes from start to finish. The guardsman stood, still smiling, and she glanced at the newly-fitted handle beside his hip, the new bolt, unthrown, where there had been only broken pieces before. "Sorry to disturb," he said again. His smile faltered when she did not answer it; when she turned her head away he leant forward, just enough to touch the table between them, and withdrew.

Her brother went with him. She heard his voice from the atrium, low apology, a promise of cards, and abruptly she realized—she _could_ hear him—and she turned—

The door stood open, unlocked. And its key left on her table, brilliant brass to match the new fittings. Hers. Not his. _Hers_.

She closed the door, locked it because she could. Then she went to the window and watched as the guardsman strode down the street in sunlight beneath her, whistling cheerfully, hammer swinging from his hands.

"Thank you," she said, the gratitude unfamiliar, and smoothed her thumb over the key's handle, over and over, until the brass grew warm.

—

On the twelfth day, she went with Fenris to Hawke's mansion, where the Champion served her duck and sage, and her brother filled her wineglass with Nevarran red, and neither they nor the pirate nor the Dalish elf who shared their table spoke once of her betrayal.

On the fifteenth day she walked to the market alone, her brother's coin at her waist, and when the man Jean-Luc who sold cloth fine as any in Minrathous lamented his daughter's new marriage, she offered her skill of her own choice, for fair wages earned by her own hand.

On the twentieth day she asked her brother to repair the roofs and was not surprised when he agreed readily, without hesitation, without asking her once her reasons. She did not know them herself. But if she were to stay—

—

On the thirty-first day she woke to the smell of bread and honey, and when she made her sleep-stiff way down her brother's stairs she found the Champion in her brother's kitchen, clad only in a heavy nightshirt, cursing quietly and _fiercely_ at a pan of hot buns on the stone table, still steaming, their tops scorched black. She paused in the doorway, surprised, and as she watched the city's savior thrust both hands into a dish of cool water by the sink, still cursing with every breath, she felt herself begin to smile.

"Bloody flames and _pyre_ ," Hawke groused to no one, and brought her wet fingertips to her mouth with a noisy whimper. "Bloody _buns_. Fifteen minutes, she said, not a minute more—well, _Orana_ , that was thirteen and a bit and they _still_ burned and now they're bloody _black_ , and my fingers are on fire, and I swear by the song of the Bride that if they say _one word_ I'm going to take the whole lot and throw them right in their—Varania!"

She laughed again, the sound stifled by her fingers, and Hawke looked properly abashed for a full moment before shoving her hair from her eyes. "Good morning," she said, rueful, and looked again to her tray of burnt buns. "I hope I didn't wake you."

"No. I used to wake earlier than this." She drew nearer without permission, touched the nearest one. "How did you burn the top?"

Hawke coughed into her hand, glanced at the ceiling. "Orana said…look, there was something about a glaze, and she said it would be better warm, and I am, perhaps, not the most patient person you've ever met."

"You set them on fire? With _magic_?"

"Only a little!"

She shook her head, amazed. "In my brother's home."

"Well. Yours too, technically."

That was—too close, and without answering Varania began to pick the blackest bits from the row of buns nearest. "Is there sugar here?"

"It depends on what Orana's been able to sneak in, I suppose." But a moment later Hawke unearthed a small blue-glazed pot from behind the worn sink with the prize inside, and at Varania's direction she sifted it until it was finer and sweeter, and once the honey had been drizzled into its new-made bowls of bread she sprinkled it carefully atop each one.

"There," Varania said, suddenly unsure, but Hawke was smiling.

"They certainly look better, anyway. How did you know to do that?"

Common knowledge, in the master's kitchens. No slave could not remake burnt bread into something new. "I learned it in Minrathous."

"Well, it's brilliant." Hawke peeled the nearest to her from the tray, stuck at the edges with gleaming honey, and closed her eyes at the first bite. "And delicious. And—I just remembered. Merrill said she'd be happy to start your lessons tomorrow, if you like. She has a spare staff that she thinks will work very well with what you've already learned."

"I would. Thank you."

"It's my pleasure. I'll pass it along."

A noise at the doorway. They both turned, Hawke with bun still to her mouth, and her brother leaned one shoulder against the frame, his eyes heavy-lidded still with sleep, his hair tousled. He wore no shirt, and the markings shone brighter in the morning than she remembered. "What is this?" he asked, the last word swallowed in a yawn.

"Breakfast," Hawke said, entirely too cheerful for the hour, and crossed near enough to him that his arm could slide around her waist, that she could hold a torn piece of bread to his mouth without reaching. He ate it from her hands, the lyrium on his throat glinting as he swallowed, and scrubbed the heel of his palm across his eyes. "Good," he said, and yawned again.

"Thank your sister. She saved them from consignment to the fire."

He opened his eyes, met hers. "Thank you, Varania. They will keep well."

She knew they would be. Still—pleased despite herself at his praise, and annoyed for the same reason, and as Hawke and her brother made their way to the chairs set at the table Varania busied herself with the kettle, avoiding them both for the more welcome familiarity of boiling tea. She poured three cups and brought them to the table.

Hawke sat across from Fenris. An open seat at her right, or his left: a small, startling thing.

She sat beside her brother, her heart inexplicably sore, and ate with them both, quietly.

—

On the first day, her brother brought her to his home. It was worn and weathered and rank with neglect even in the dimming daylight, and when he brought her to the room that he had chosen for her it held a damp hearth and no candles, the bedcovers dusty and untended, the roof unpatched. She could count the stars from her pillow.

"My apologies," he said, and she could not read his face in twilight. "This will be cleaned tomorrow."

More than cleaning needed. She nodded, swallowed hard, and stepped forward; when she gathered her courage to look again, her brother was gone.

She woke in the hour after midnight from a dream of Danarius's hand on her shoulder. In a moment she was up, dressed; in another she had fled silently through her brother's house to the open atrium and the door that guarded its entrance, pale stars above to mark her flight from everything that this place held, memory and lack of it and Leto who was not Leto, this stranger with her mother's eyes and no kindness in his voice. Nothing for her here, nothing, nothing—

She stopped. Her hand was still outstretched; an inch farther and she would reach the door, its broken latch held in place with wire and weight. She did not know Kirkwall; she did not care. The taste of cold night air bit through the door's cracks, teasing her with freedom. Where—she could not—she _couldn't_ —

His gaze, then, like the graze of a sword-tip over the back of her neck. An inch. Only an inch. She did not move.

"Please," he said. His voice was very rough; she did not think it was only sleep. "It would mean a great deal to me if…"

Silence. Too softly, she said, "If what?"

"If you would stay."

Only an inch. She crossed it, to remind herself that she could, and put fingers to the cold, dented brass that barred her way. Then she turned, drawing herself up, lifting her chin until she could meet her brother's eyes in the dark, her mother's eyes, the face that was Leto's and not Leto's in this home that was his and not his.

"I will stay," she said, and she did.

—


	35. First Sentence Meme, Pt. 1 (Hawke/Fenris)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **AN:** The next few chapters are my contributions to the first-sentence meme on Tumblr, in which a friend submits the first line of a fic and the recipient is meant to write the next five sentences.
> 
> (I am, as you might have expected, very bad about sticking to five sentences.)
> 
> Please note that these fills may contain Inquisition spoilers or feature Inquisition characters. Otherwise, enjoy!

_1\. From w0rdinista, 300 words. Hawke/Fenris._

—

Outside, rain fell from the leaden sky, colder than ice and sharper than needles; fortunately the liquid in his glass was far warmer—though it too was sharp, it burned on the way down.

—

It wasn't the first time he'd suffered cheap liquor for the sake of its more medicinal properties, but even the whiskey couldn't dull the memory of the creature the Wardens had kept leashed in their secret tower.

A magister. One of _the_ magisters, if the beast was to be believed, the first, who'd blacked the Golden City and brought the darkspawn into being with their defilement. The thing had not even noticed Fenris; the weird, piercing eyes had looked upon him and passed over him, slave, too base for acknowledgement when Hawke stood between with her blood a challenge to the magister's very existence.

He shuddered again, remembering the weight of foul, foreign magic seeping into his lyrium, and threw back the rest of the drink. A move better-suited to Isabela, perhaps, but he was tired, and unsettled, and made uneasy by more things than he could name, and when the door opened behind him he nearly missed the sound of it beneath the thump of his glass against the table.

"At the risk of banality, I'd say this looks a lot like brooding."

"Hawke," he sighed, and a moment later her arms came around his shoulders from behind, her mouth coming against the crook of his neck as she bent over the back of the sofa. "I didn't expect you so soon."

"You're in my house," she pointed out, her words muffled in his skin.

True enough. "It was warmer than mine."

"And had bad whiskey."

Also true. He touched her hair, just for a moment; then she sighed and straightened, moving to sit on the sofa's back behind him, her hip by his shoulder, her hands folded in her lap. "It is over, Hawke."

"Is it?" she asked distantly, and took the bottle he offered her, while outside the rain continued to pour in long unbroken sheets of water, steady and drumming, greying out the world.

 

* * *

_2\. From servantofclio, 400 words. Hawke/Fenris._

—

It had been raining long enough for everything, and everyONE, to get thoroughly musty and irritable.

—

Not even the city's regular supply of bandits had been willing to venture outside in days. Now and then Varric heard reports of one path or another on the Coast flooded to impassibility; Anders, when he emerged, dripping, from Darktown, offered similar tales of the tunnels below, rank standing water preventing all but the most foolhardy from plumbing their depths.

Even Hawke's irrepressible cheer had dampened under weight of the rain. Few of her friends were willing to brave weather like this–Isabela and Merrill perhaps, she thought, though the former only with _very_ good reason–and with the city quiet she couldn't even muster cause to drag them out of their safe, warm, dry-ish homes for nothing but the sake of their company, despite how grateful she might have been for it.

All the same, she'd been indoors for _days._ Nothing else to do for it, not if she didn't want to go mad; she snatched up the furred, enchanted hood left by her father and an oiled cloak from the foyer, and after a brief word to Orana she set off into the streets.

For a while she amused herself by pretending she didn't know her destination. An alley here, a flight of long stairs there, a turn around another corner–and then, grinning even through the rivulets of water tracing down her cheeks, she found herself beneath Fenris's window.

Briefly she considered throwing a pebble, but the streets were relatively clear beneath the puddles and Fenris had few unbroken windows besides, and so in the end she settled for the barest brush of magic against one of his sturdier (if unused) shutters, knocking it against the wall one-two-three, too deliberate for wind.

She waited a moment and knocked again; then, his expression already blacker than the weather, Fenris's head and shoulders appeared in the window above his door. "Hawke," he said, brushing irritably at the stray droplets that managed to sneak under his cobwebbed eaves onto his hands and shoulders. "I should have known."

"Fenris," she singsonged, her mood already markedly improved and rising further, rain pattering cheerfully at her feet. "Have you got any dry spots left in this place?"

"That depends," he said, lifting an eyebrow, "on how wet _you_ are."

She laughed, delighted. "I'd be happy to give you a personal demonstration."

Fenris rolled his eyes and disappeared from the window; but when he opened the door, he was smiling.

 

* * *

_3\. From mynameiscloud, 360 words. Hawke/Fenris._

—

He groaned into her ear.

—

"I don't know what you _expected_ ," Hawke snapped, almost sharp enough to belie the worry. "That's what happens when you take arrows for other people."

Fenris let out a soft huff of a laugh, then groaned again as she worked the second of the barbs free. "If it matters," he said after a moment, pain tightening his voice, "the arrow was meant to hit the armor."

Hawke laughed, was angry for laughing, and cupped Fenris's cheek with her hand where his head lay in her lap. The other hand still held the ash-shafted arrow in place, its many-barbed tip embedded deep in Fenris's left shoulder, not an inch shy of the breastplate that'd done little good by proximity. "This will hurt."

"Do not waste time on my comfort, then," he said, and turned his head away.

Hawke took a breath. The man was not Fenris. The only way to bear the hitching half-gasps, the rippling, repeated shudders of his throat as he swallowed over and over, the way his bare, lined hand clenched white-knuckled around his own thigh for the sake of something to hold. Only some faceless wounded soul thrust into her path for saving. Not Fenris, who'd thrown himself between her back and the archer on this stupid journey halfway to nowhere with not even a decent village to seek for shelter.

The last barb came loose with a twist, and Fenris let out a long, hissing breath through clenched teeth. Hawke dropped the arrow on the ground, immediately set hands to healing the wound left behind (not poisoned, thank the Maker), but too torn, too deep, too near his heart, too _everything_. She could not bear it.

"I wish I could make you promise not to do this again," she muttered, infuriated by her own emotion.

Fenris lifted his hand, fingers trembling with the aftermath of pain and adrenaline, and gripped her shoulder. "I will not," he said too easily, "so long as no arrow aims at you again."

"Idiot."

Fenris laughed, soundless, breathless. "Only because of the set example."

" _Idiot_ ," she said again, but they were both still alive, and she supposed that counted for something.

 

* * *

_4\. From bearfootscar, 400 words. Hawke/Fenris._

—

The night she left, Fenris heard the vague click of the door closing, but rather than investigate, he snuggled into the Hawke-scented pillow a little deeper.

—

They'd said their goodbyes. Said them more than once, and with great enthusiasm and greater grief, and because he could not watch her leave and not follow he had asked this instead: no warning, no farewell, only a night where she was there and a morning where she was not.

He woke with dawn, and for a long time he did not move. His bed was cold, unfamiliar now after so many years; worse, the little house had grown quiet in a way it never was, not the silence of stillness but a deeper, implacable _emptiness,_ a hollow place where there had not been one before, where part of him was missing.

For a moment his eyes burned; then, impatient, he rose and dressed himself and went to the window, drawing in a clean, calming breath, the edges of it sharper with the scent of her herb garden laid carefully, row by row, beneath the window. Somewhere behind him lay a sheet with explicit instructions on its tending; beneath that hid another page for daily chores, and another for reminders, and scattered haphazardly through them all almost careless declarations of unending affection, as if between caring for the verbena and washing clothes he might forget that she loved him.

He missed her. Already, not a day yet gone, as if a knife had slid between his ribs, and he wondered at the hurt.

In another room a small cry began, low at first and then rising, and Fenris turned away from the window. As he entered the room the cries quieted; as he lifted his daughter from her bed they became hiccups and short, heaving breaths, her dark head fitting so easily on his shoulder as he settled her against his chest.

"Hush," he said softly, and when she did not he began the long walk through the small house, into rooms and out of them again, down the narrow hallway of this place he and Hawke had intended to be a home. He did not think of their emptiness; he did not look for her. Eventually his daughter's cries quieted; and when he felt her breaths smooth out again into something like sleep he touched her small cheek, and her shoulder, and freed at last from her tiny fisted grip a long, worn, loved length of red ribbon, the last gift Hawke had left for them both.

 

* * *

_5\. From kiracompton, 230 words. Hawke/Fenris._

—

The look he's giving her is particularly vile, but Hawke does her best to stand her ground.

—

She's not here on her own behalf, she tells herself. For the Inquisition. For the Inquisition. For the—

"And to bring _that_ with her," the man says to his expensively-dressed companion, voice obviously pitched to carry, and Hawke thinks: right, screw the Inquisition.

It surprises her that _he's_ obviously surprised at her approach, his grip tightening on his perfect Orlesian champagne flute, his eyebrows lifting behind his perfect Orlesian mask. "Forgive me," she says on approach, her gown swishing delicately at her ankles as she bows and smiles and hopes her tone conveys as much of the opposite sentiment as possible, "but I _think_ I heard you mention something of my companion?"

He stutters, glances at his friends, and recovers again. "I'm sure I don't know what you mean, Champion."

"Oh, my friend, but you did! In fact, I could swear to hearing the words 'knife-ear,' 'brand,' and 'savage' more than a dozen times in the last hour. Remarkable, really, that as grown as you are you should know so few words."

"Now see here," he starts, obviously incensed, "just because you brought a Tevinter bedslave to a formal _ball—_ "

"Tevinter—" Hawke echoes, and that is how she ends up writing a formal apology to Lady Montilyet for punching Lord Evereaux Montpensier into the four-hundred-year-old Cherub's Fountain at the Fête of the White Palace.

(She does not, however, regret it.)

 

* * *

_6\. From marigoldfaucet, 365 words. Hawke/Fenris._

—

Fenris is baking.

—

It's not the first time Hawke's found him in her kitchen, especially not when Orana is cooking, but it _is_ the first time she's discovered him there with a bowl in one hand and a book open on the counter before him, his lips moving slowly with every word. Orana perches on a tall stool beside him, nodding at something he says; she nods again when he proffers the bowl, pleased by whatever she sees inside it, and Fenris turns to the greased metal sheet beside the oven.

Somehow, Hawke doesn't want to—interrupt this, and she waits until Fenris has dolloped eighteen creamy, ginger-brown spoonfuls of dough on the sheet and then deposited it in the oven before she shifts in the doorway. Orana glances over, begins to smile; Fenris _flushes_ , of all things, the very tips of his ears staining red, and meets her eyes with something like defiance.

"Hungry?" she asks, interest without mockery.

"No." He fidgets, turns to the book, back again. She has never seen him so discomposed. "I thought you were with Aveline."

"We finished early. She found the handkerchiefs she was looking for at the second place we tried."

"Ah," he says, and frowns.

Perhaps she shouldn't have stayed after all. "Sorry, I've interrupted. I'll leave you to, um. Whatever this—"

"No," Fenris says, cutting her off, and then he sighs and gestures at the book. "How long have you been giving me lessons, Hawke?"

"Oh—I don't know. Three years, almost? Not that you've needed them for some time."

He lifts his chin. "So. I can read or I cannot."

"Of course you can," she says, and then understands all at once what he means. " _Oh_. It's a test."

"Just so."

"With a very obvious pass or fail."

Fenris inclines his head, and Hawke can't repress the urge to kiss his cheek. "If it matters," she adds, winking at Orana, "edible or not, I will eat every single one of them."

"Please don't," Fenris says, but Orana smiles.

"They've looked wonderful so far. They ought to be perfect."

(They are, as it happens, but the quiet, embarrassed pride in Fenris's face would have made ash taste sweet.)


	36. First Sentence Meme, Pt. 2 (Hawke/Fenris)

_7\. From locketofyourhair, 340 words. Hawke/Fenris._

—

There are worse ways to wake up than tiny fingers curling in his hair (and he does not dwell on them) but that does not change the fact that it's before dawn.

—

Even as early a riser as he is, this is too much. "Hawke," he tries without opening his eyes, his voice rough with sleep, and reaches for the tiny wrist that should, theoretically, be attached to the tiny fingers. "Your child is awake."

Hawke acknowledges this with an incomprehensible mumble and rolls away from them both, drawing the thick coverlet higher to her shoulders, exposing Fenris's far arm to a shock of cool air in the process. He cracks a baleful eye just in time to see her pull the pillow over her head, and she groans again when he yanks the covers back over himself.

" _Hawke_."

"Papa," comes the whisper, choked with giggles, and Fenris closes his eyes, trying desperately to cling to the last vestiges of sleep. "Papa, _guess what."_

Probably futile. He tries anyway. "No."

A sudden shift of the mattress as their daughter clambers onto the bed, knees cheerfully inserting themselves into the tenderest places of Fenris's ribs. "Guess!"

"Hawke." If he is to be pestered, so will she. How little he had expected this child to bring out the child in him. "Hawke. _Hawke_."

"If someone," she says at last, thick through the pillow, "is not on the verge of death, they're about to be."

"Your daughter wants you."

"It's you she's calling," Hawke points out, but the daughter in question apparently takes that as invitation and knees and elbows her way to her mother's side of the bed. Somewhere outside a bird begins to chirp, piercing and repetitive.

"Guess what, Mama! I painted a picture!"

"Adorable," Hawke sighs. There is a long moment of perfect silence, and then Hawke and Fenris stiffen at the same time. "How?" Hawke asks at the same moment Fenris says, _"Where?"_

Their daughter only giggles, an innocent sound to portend such doom. "It is your turn," he tries without much hope, but he is awake now regardless, and when Hawke throws back the covers, he rises with her.

"Come on," she says ruefully, and together they follow their daughter into chaos.

 

* * *

_8\. From silksieve, 933 words. Hawke/Fenris._

—

"You said this would work!" she yelled.

—

"It would have," Fenris shouted back, "if you did not reach for _fire_ every time you're startled!"

Hawke spluttered, attempted to blow sodden bangs out of her eyes, and spluttered again as the river threw a wave over her head. On the other side of the enormous rock they both clung to Fenris looked little better, his white hair plastered against his head, the sword lashed to his back catching the swirling water in odd ways, throwing sprays of glitter over his shoulders with every movement.

She glanced up at the remains of the narrow, rickety wooden bridge above them, the one that'd been their only way across the river—right before the rotted board had shattered under her foot and she'd accidentally set fire to the rest of it in her surprise. The sky was almost insultingly bright past the charred, smoking remains, as if the Maker had wanted to give her imminent demise the blessing of a sunny spring.

"Oops," she offered weakly, and Fenris scowled as he refirmed his grip on the boulder's river-slick surface.

"Apologize later," he snapped. "We need to get out of here, Hawke!"

"No, really?" Her hand slipped; she flung herself against stone and found better purchase, shaking her head in fruitless attempt to clear the water from her eyes. "I thought we'd just wallow here forever!"

Fenris sneered, then glanced behind her, upriver. "There is a log lodged between two rocks. Can you free it?"

Hawke drew in a breath, then twisted against the boulder as best she could without jeopardizing her hold. A good log, not twenty yards behind her—a _large_ one, more importantly, and long enough to reach from their boulder to shore if she aimed it properly. If she missed, though, she risked knocking them both from their tentative shelter, lost to the implacable mercy of whatever rapids or falls lurked ahead. Not her favorite option.

Not much choice, either.

"All right," she said. Beneath the surface of the river her armored boots dragged heavily at her legs, her sodden coat an equal weight. "If I miss, I expect you to save me."

"Don't miss, Hawke."

She snorted, and after a long moment to judge her angle, _pushed_ just the barest bit at the nearer end of the log. It rocked, resettled into its resting place; she pushed again and a wave broke over it, enough to jar its weight free with a terrifying groan of wood and earth.

"Here it comes!" she shouted, as if Fenris could not see, and then the river had hold of the log and was bringing it towards them, barreling almost faster than she could believe, so much larger in freedom than it had been half-hidden by water. She gritted her teeth, _shoved_ again—and again, and again, angling the log as best she could until the far end pointed downriver, towards the shore, a clumsy arrow to drive into the earth when she commanded.

"Wait," Fenris said, and she waited, waited, waited as the thing bore down on them, her heart pounding, the river pounding against her; then– " _Now!_ " he shouted and magic exploded out of her hand, a solid wall of sheer force rocketing the log spear-like into the shore. A breathless moment of terror as it quivered, slipped a foot, farther—then the far end dug deep into the earth and the nearer end slammed like a hammer against their boulder, not two feet from Hawke's hand, and lodged there with all the finality of Isabela slapping down her hand at cards.

Hawke laughed, the sounding ringing out giddy and clear in the sunlight, and as Fenris watched she began edging her way across the makeshift bridge, chest to log, the river crushing impassively against her back. A lifetime's minute later and she felt solid ground beneath her feet; a clumsy pull of earth and she had a foothold, then two, and she levered herself from river to safe, precious, perfect earth with a groan.

"Your turn," she shouted, when she could speak, and Fenris scowled. His was the harder on the wrong side of the log, the river eager to push him downriver and away from her; but even as Hawke steadied herself to do— _something_ —Fenris let out a ferocious snarl and with a brilliant burst of lyrium-light, had dragged most of his body atop the boulder. Another shout and he was free of the river; then, carefully as she had, began to crawl along the log towards shore and safety.

It was more than wide enough, especially given Fenris's narrow elfish knees, and in short order he'd covered most of the distance without incident. Hawke reached for him the instant he neared; then he was on his feet and in her arms and she was laughing and he was—well, less alight, and despite their breathlessness and the brush with death and the fact that they were both soaked enough to wring out a second river, Hawke could not keep from grinning when he took her face in his hands and kissed her.

"I won't burn the bridge next time," she said, when Fenris had drawn back, shaken her by the shoulders, and kissed her again. "I promise."

"Next time," he said drily, shoving his sodden hair from his eyes, "I will cross the bridge first."

"Deal," Hawke said, and began to wring out her shirt. "But look at it this way: at least we're across the river!"

Fenris snorted, and shook his head sharply enough that water sprayed across them both, but she thought she saw him smirk.

—

 

* * *

_9\. From hatepig, 1718 words. Hawke/Fenris._

—

By the time they have staunched the bleeding, Fenris realizes he should've thought more about what the cold would do to Hawke, rather than lingering bandits."

—

When she and the bandit she'd grappled with had first gone through the ice his heart had stopped; when the tower of flame exploded into the winter air and Hawke scrabbled through its wake, gasping, for purchase on the slick ice, it had started again, sending him sprawling across the ice for her hands. The bandit had not emerged after her; behind Fenris had been the other three, their blood smeared brilliant and crimson across the ice.

A struggle, silent, terrifying, as she'd battled to grip with hands gone numb and frozen; a bolt of fear down his spine when he'd hauled her out at last and the ice had cracked ominously beneath his knees. He hadn't tried to stand; instead he'd gripped her arm and shoulder and _dragged_ her behind, fast as he could move, to thicker ice he'd known would hold his weight.

And then he'd seen the blood, bright as dye, trailing behind Hawke with every step, and he'd thought—

The place where the ice broke stands out like a scab, black water scarring the smooth white surface of the frozen river, of the whiter snow-covered hills that rise all around them. Hawke still hasn't spoken, her eyelids fluttering as Fenris tightens the bandage around her thigh. Her lips have gone blue without his noticing, her wet hair still plastered to her cheeks, and he—

"Hawke," he says, one hand on her throat for her pulse. She is so cold. So cold, and he should have— "Hawke?"

"Ffff," she tries, and clenches her eyes shut. "F-ffen—"

Enough. They'd passed a cave just before emerging onto the frozen river—and into the ambush—and Fenris lifts her in arms, pack and all, before turning on his heel.

It takes precious few minutes to reach the cave, but they _are_ precious when Hawke begins slurring sounds into the winter air, her eyes unfocused over his shoulder, her soaked cloak like an anchor dragging on them both. Not noticeably warmer inside, but no colder either, and enough brush and leaves from warmer seasons hidden dry in the cave's shallow depths to start a fire.

Fenris does, wasting no movements, and the instant the first flicker has caught he reaches for Hawke, stripping her of cloak and vest and soaked, ruined boots, of the gloves that offer no shelter now against the wintry air. Her shirt is harder to remove; she has begun to fight him, now, not strong but impossible to ignore, and he must pin her arms to her sides before she allows him to work the clasps of her shirt.

His hasty field bandage he must unwind to divest her of her trousers, and he curses again at the long, deep slice that runs down the inside of her thigh. She needs healing. She needs to heal _herself_ , and she needs to wake up, and he—doesn't know what to do. No one dies of frostbite in Tevinter.

He gets her trousers free. Her smalls, too, laid beside the fire he stokes again; then he wraps her in his own cloak, damp at the hem but otherwise sound, and moves her as close to the fire as he dares. Their oiled packs, when he yanks them close, are infuriatingly useless; they'd been traveling light for a reason and had brought little with them, and the only things he finds of worth are a spare pair of stockings and a headwrap she'd picked up on the journey. Still, better than nothing, and then, beneath them—elfroot potion, infinitely more precious.

The stockings she accepts, as well as his clumsy hood, but the moment he lifts her head for the potion she begins thrashing, her head tossing from side to side, arms trapped by his cloak, meaningless protest that does not still even through his alternate cajoling and threatening. He tries to pinch her nose as he has seen women do with infants, but she will not swallow and spits out what he can pour in.

Too little to spare. He takes a mouthful of bitter elfroot, bends over Hawke, and presses his lips to hers. Closed, first, until she recognizes him; then as she stills he coaxes her mouth open with his own and lets in the elfroot, swallow by swallow, his fingers gentle on her throat for comfort and persuasion both. She takes everything he offers, trust terrifying in its totality, and again a second time, and a third, until the phial is closer to empty than full and Hawke's wound is, if not sealed, no longer bleeding. Her lips are like ice.

Enough. He caps the vial, adds more brush to the fire, gathers the rest for easy feeding—enough for hours yet, and Fenris is grateful for the providence. Her clothes he spreads where he can, just far enough from the fire that an errant spark will not burn them all, and when he is finished he strips himself of his own boots, overtunic, and vest, their metal fasteners chipped with ice and the fabric soaked where he held Hawke against him. His own trousers he leaves on for prudence's sake—if there are more bandits, he will not be totally defenseless—and his undershirt he wraps around Hawke's feet, adding to what warmth he can provide to skin so cold he can feel it through two layers of fabric.

Then, when he is certain there is nothing else he can provide from her from their limited stores, Fenris unwraps her from the cloak long enough that he can slide in beside her and pull her to his chest. She is so cold— _so_ cold—even with the fire at her back there is no warmth to her, Hawke who has _always_ been warm, and her hands wrapped in his hands between them are cold as a corpse.

He brings them to his mouth, breathes hot and heavy on curled fingers. They twitch, once; then Hawke croaks, "Don't chafe."

Fenris glances up, startled, pained by hope. Hawke's watching him, exhausted but lucid, and her mouth quirks at his almost-smile. "Don't chafe my fingers," she repeats, her eyes slipping shut. "They'll swell. If you rub them. Like…saus. Sausages."

"Then I will not," he murmurs, and breathes on them again. "What else should I do?"

"Just…" she begins, and he realizes she has begun to shiver, slight trembling things at first, and then in a matter of moments a deep, frightening, full-body shake that rocks her violently in his arms. "Just stay here," she grits out through clenched teeth, every line of her bare throat pulled hard as wire. "Keep being—keep—keep being warm."

He can do that. He can, in fact, do little else, and he wraps both arms around her and throws one leg over hers, pulling her naked body as close against his as he can. The fire still burns brightly; the cloak wraps around them both, and Fenris pulls it even tighter when Hawke lets out a low, involuntary whine.

"S—s—" she tries, teeth audibly clacking together, and Fenris bends his head even closer until her icy cheek rests on his. "Sorry," she gets out at last, along with a breathless laugh. "Stupid."

"I presume you didn't intend to fall into the river."

"Mm. Not—not—not as such."

"Then there is nothing to forgive."

Hawke laughs again, still shivering, and curls into him. "Love you."

He closes his eyes—and a thought occurs to him. "Hawke. Can you call fire?"

"W-weak," she says, the first consonant dragged out over several seconds as she struggles to speak through numb lips. "Good idea. Not strong—strong enough."

He draws in a breath, lets it out again. Then, carefully, not enough to overwhelm but enough to _warm_ , Fenris pulls on the strength of the lyrium until the whole of his bare chest is aglow. It glitters weirdly on Hawke's face, thrown light on her cheek and shining through the cloak they're wrapped in, glinting in Hawke's eyes through her surprise—and gratitude.

She closes her eyes and flattens palms like ice against his chest. He suppresses the urge to flinch at the cold, and again at that old, familiar ache as the lyrium is siphoned out of his skin; he says, startled at his own humor, "Please don't burn either of us."

"Try," Hawke murmurs, eyes half-lidded—and then all at once heat _floods_ through her, a living thing that ripples down her skin, so stark between cold and hot that for a moment Fenris cannot understand it. He can feel the line of it down her chest where she's pressed against him, her waist, her thighs down to her feet, as if the flame that burns at her back has begun to lick through her. Her fingers curl around his, suddenly hot; her face flushes all at once, her lips flooding pink, her cheeks blushing with warmth that had not been there a moment before. She still shivers, but it no longer wracks her like a fever, and Fenris—breathes, letting the lyrium die, stunned by the relief that flares just as hot in his heart.

"That," she says, no stumble now, no hesitation to her smile, "was brilliant. You're amazing, Fenris. Amazing. I—thank you."

He shakes his head, pulls her close again until she cannot see his face. "I'm glad it could—I could—help." He pauses, then: "How do you feel?"

"Better. Still freezing, but not like I'm at death's door. Thigh's not bad. I think it can wait."

Good, Fenris thinks, and lets out a long, slow breath. "We'll wait here, then, until you have recovered."

"Mm." Her eyes are drooping, now; he can feel her beginning to relax against him for the first time in over an hour, her head heavy on his shoulder, her breath hot on his collarbone. "It'll be a few hours yet, anyway."

"Oh?"

"My clothes are wet," she points out, and presses a sleepy kiss to his throat. "And also, I'm naked."

"A fair point," Fenris allows, smiling despite himself, and when she slips into a light doze he permits himself to follow, his pulse finally beginning to slow, safe and sound and silent in a wild winter cave that has, against all odds, finally managed to grow warm.


	37. First Sentence Meme, Pt. 3 (Misc.)

_10\. From anonymous, 178 words. Trevelyan, Cole.  
_

—

A shadow falls across the path as she steps out into the courtyard.

—

She's tired enough that she can't quite place it at first, the enormous blobby thing atop it skewing her perception; then she realizes it's Cole, and Cole's hat, and she looks up in time to see him hop off the low ledge that runs along the gardens. "Cole?"

"Something happened," he says, blinking rapidly. "In my mind. I saw things that weren't true, that didn't make any sense."

Oh, no. The last thing she needs is a—well, whatever Cole is now—on the verge of hallucinations on top of everything else. "What did you see?"

"Memories. Not anyone else's, but mine. Evangeline, lively, living, letting me go, letting me grow. Burning, brilliant bone: a dragon, but not. I was naked," he adds at the end, and Trevelyan pauses.

"Cole," she says very slowly, because if she's wrong… "were you…asleep?"

"Like falling in battle," he says, and cocks his head. "Only nobody hit me this time."

"Okay." Trevelyan looks up, repressing her smile, and down again. "Okay. Come with me, Cole, and let me tell you about dreams."

—

 

* * *

_11\. From sparklemagpie, 106 words, and incidentally, the only one I managed to keep to five actual sentences. Trevelyan, Inquisition spoilers._

—

"No no. Wait. Give it a minute. I want to see what she does..."

—

"She's the one person entirely indispensable in this entire war, and you want to see what she does?"

Josephine laughs, leaning out the window, and Cullen shakes his head as he watches over her shoulder. Below in the courtyard, Trevelyan has propped her fists on her hips, obviously perplexed by the creature before her; Cassandra stands at her side, just as obviously annoyed. She says something that makes Trevelyan shrug, then throws up her hands.

"I will admit that it's one of the most unlikely things I've ever seen," Josephine says at last, and below them the enormous, improbable war nug snuffles blithely through the grass.

—

 

* * *

_12\. From sekritjay, 262 words. Trevelyan, Dorian, Sera, Bull._

—

Considering the gravity of the situation, it was surprising to all that the loudest and most histrionic of their party could only respond with a curt "Oh, fuck."

—

"What," said Trevelyan, very carefully and very precisely, "am I supposed to do now?"

They all considered. Halamshiral had stood upon the precipice of disaster from the start, every Orlesian dandy present slavering to see the Inquisition attempt to negotiate the dance of the Great Game with feet more suited to stomping through Dalish plains than fitting into jeweled slippers. Weeks of meetings with Josephine and Leliana, of practicing the newest dances and the oldest ones, the sheer indignity of being fit with the garish scarlet suit–

And now this: the Herald of Andraste, leader of the iconoclastic Inquisition, the first mortal to walk in the Fade in a thousand years–strung upside down on a trellis in the middle of the Empress's garden by the seat of her pants.

"Fuck," Sera offered a second time, and Dorian stifled a cough that sounded remarkably like laughter.

Trevelyan closed her eyes. "If you do not get me down immediately, _Pavus_ , I will let Sera do that thing she's been wanting to do since she met you."

Sera gasped, sharp and high and delighted; Dorian choked. But Bull came to her rescue in the end, one enormous hand giving her just the push she needed to twist herself against the trellis and find her own purchase between the (thankfully) thornless roses. Trevelyan dropped the last few feet to the earth, smoothed her jacket, and drew in a long, slow, steadying breath.

"Tell me," she said at last, "that my trousers are not torn."

There was a long pause.

 _"Fuck,"_ Sera said, and Trevelyan sighed.


	38. From Whisker to Tail (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris **  
Rating:** K+ **  
Word Count:** 1500 ****  
Notes: For onemooncircles, who had a bit of a rough week, and who asked at the end of it:

_Can anyone recommend any blogs dedicated to posting descriptions of happy-drunk Fenris curled up in an oversized armchair and reading a book about kitten-care while petting Hawke's dog and snuggling under a patchwork quilt made for him as a Satinalia gift by Orana and Varania? I realize that's a fairly specific ask but I could really use this in my life right now._

She received quite a number of really superb fills, but considering how dear she's become to me over the years, I had to give it a shot, too.

—

"You're drunk," says Hawke.

Fenris's head falls heavily against the back of the armchair, a peculiar twitch to his lips signaling the not-quite-perfect control that only comes with his worst inebriation. "I am," he tells her, and shrugs. It's not a particularly elegant one, as shrugs go, but at least he's not retreated into that too-heavy silence that often heralds a rougher night. "Does that bother you?"

"That depends. How much of my good wine have you had?"

Fenris laughs outright, waves an indolent hand towards the endtable at his left. One empty bottle—shared between the two of them earlier—and another half-so, abandoned on her part after Aveline had dropped by for a quick chat about a run to the Coast the week before. "Enough. You left."

"I came back." Hawke saunters closer, drawing the curtains against the hazy twilight as she passes, and pulls a long swig herself direct from the bottle's mouth. "Aveline says hello, you know. Just like that. 'Tell Fenris hello for me.' Message relayed, job done."

" _You_ are drunk."

"Not yet," Hawke sighs, and runs her fingers lazily through Fenris's hair as she passes by his chair. Insultingly soft for a man who couldn't care less, though his eyes fall shut on the second draw with a low, pleased hum, and Hawke grins through the abrupt slosh of immense, tipsy affection. "You've got too much of a lead on me, I think."

"You might try."

"You might regret it if I do," Hawke says with a bark of laughter, and replaces the bottle on the table. It's loud enough to bring the dog through the door a moment later, his nails tacking against the polished wooden floor; at the sight of his human bent a bit lopsidedly over the elf in the armchair, he lets out a heavy _wuff_ of exasperation and flops to his stomach at Fenris's bare feet.

Fenris smiles, drops a careless hand atop the enormous head. "See, Hawke. The dog encourages it."

"He does _not,_ " Hawke says, laughing again, and at Fenris's smirk she drapes both arms over the back of the chair and leans down to kiss him. He lifts his face readily enough; practice has made him comfortable with her sentiment, and Hawke is—modestly, of course—an _excellent_ kisser, and by the time his fingers have tangled in the linen of her shirt at her waist her pulse has already begun to thud hard in her throat. Still, there is no reason to rush; instead she smoothes her fingertips down both sides of his face, drops them to his throat, then along the lines of his shoulders, less broad without the armor and yet perfectly delectable in fine black cambric. "You're attempting to distract me. It's a very devious tactic."

He looks faintly insulted, but his palm sliding up her waist and down it again is very warm. "These accusations."

"Can you blame me? You taste like wine. You look _very_ good in black. And you're _smiling,_ Fenris. What's a girl to do?"

"I am not smiling," Fenris says through a wildly unsuccessful attempt to repress it, and when Hawke grins his other hand joins the first at her waist and pulls. After a momentary upending of the world Hawke finds herself in Fenris's lap, his fingers pressing against her shoulder blades, her legs swinging loose over one overstuffed arm of the preposterously comfortable chair.

"This," Hawke says after a moment, when Fenris's mouth is not quite so insistent and his eyes not quite so soft, "is precisely what I mean by 'devious.' What a dirty trick for such a comfortable elf."

He smiles again, an abrupt quirk of the corner of his mouth, and Hawke runs her fingers through his hair once more before dragging free the quilt laid over the chair's back. It takes only a moment to arrange it over her legs and his, his arms lifting above the hem before resettling at her waist. They don't unfold it often, the blue-and-gold squares still too cherished for everyday use, but it's warm and it's _real_ , Varania's design and Orana's handiwork, and the change that passes over Fenris's face only for an instant when he sees it, as it always does—that's real, too, and Hawke cups his cheek with her hand so that she can see it better, so she can remember if only for this moment how Fenris looks when he does not hide his happiness.

"What is it?" he asks, his voice low, and at Hawke's shake of her head his smile quirks again, and his hand slides easily to the curve of her thigh through the quilt. "If I'd known you intended to stay so long, I would have brought more wine."

"What's stopping you from sharing?"

He glances at the bottle forgotten at his elbow, but Hawke intends a distinctly literal interpretation, and the genuine laugh that startles free at her kiss is enough to have her grinning against Fenris's mouth. It's a sloppy thing, both of them entirely too inebriated for anything more interesting—or inciting—but it's _wonderful_ , just like this, this slow warm intimacy not quite familiar yet but nearer every day, Fenris strong and solid under her legs, his fingers drifting lazily up and down her spine, the quiet, sudden breaths against her lips when they break, come together again.

She presses her tongue against his lower lip; he palms the back of her neck and pulls her closer, opening his mouth under hers, wine on his lips and hers too, and a deep humming happiness in her chest she can't bear to stifle. He kisses her twice more, until she's fairly certain she's nigh to bursting with contentment, and then she wraps her arms around his neck and buries her head in his shoulder, the lyrium warm and living against her mouth. Fenris draws a long breath that she can feel rise against her chest; then he lets it out again, his fingers lifting to touch the ends of her hair.

"Hawke," he says at last, and nothing else. Varania's quilt lies warm and weighted over them both.

Eventually, when she feels that she must either move or resign herself to the rest of her lifetime spent sleeping atop her favorite elf in Thedas, Hawke turns her face until her forehead lies against his neck. "You know," she says, just loud enough to be heard over the dog's muffled snores, "I never asked what you were doing when I came in."

"You did not."

"And?"

He laughs, makes a vague gesture she can feel against her back. "Reading, Hawke. As one does in libraries."

"My, my, you're being so coy."

"Not intentionally." He stretches against her, reaching across the arm of the chair to the endtable, then leans back with a slim yellow volume in one hand. "It's what was at hand. The subject matter is somewhat…."

"Prurient?"

"Tame."

Hawke laughs. "Do tell."

He hands her the book instead. It's as thin as she thought, and—she is rather more drunk than she thought, too, the words inconsiderately dancing across the page before she can settle them again. In retrospect, she hopes Aveline hadn't been too offended; perhaps that's why the meeting had been so short. " _From Whisker to Tail: Retrieving Your Tender, Affectionate Kitten from the Claws of the Sour Puss._ Fenris, _really_?"

He's laughing again, his lips pressed tight, his eyes bright. "As I said, it was at hand."

"I didn't even know I _had_ this," she says, leaning her head against his own, resting the spine of the book against his knee as she cracks it open. "Maybe Isabela planted it."

"You have no secret desire for a small cat that I should know of, then."

"That you should know of, no," Hawke purrs, giving a teasing nip to his jaw. "But perhaps you should be wary of any covered baskets Merrill brings by in the next few weeks."

"Dangerous threat indeed," Fenris says, and the dog lets out a heavy sigh and rolls to his back. They both watch him for a moment, but with another deep sigh, he settles again with all four paws aloft. "Have you asked permission?"

"Mm. An excellent question, really."

He laughs, low and entirely easy, and when she leans back against him his arm comes around her shoulders in something very close to gentleness. She pillows her cheek on his shoulder, rubs a thumb over the black cambric across his chest; he spreads his hand over her leg in answer with the Satinalia quilt between them, and turns to the second chapter of the kitten book she still can't believe she owns.

She murmurs, "Read to me."

Wine on his breath, at her elbow; his taste in her mouth; the dog at their feet; Varania and Orana's quilt atop them to keep them warm against the night.

"As you like," Fenris says, smiling, and he does.


	39. love letter to a striking match (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris **  
Rating:** K+ **  
Word Count:** 1900  
 **Notes:** Unapologetically indulgent character study served heavy on the metaphor. For no other reason than I love these characters a lot, and I wanted to.

 **Soundtrack:** [Frailty (for the Dearly Departed)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOZkoalCoHc), by Hammock.

—

love letter to a striking match

—

Here is the heart of it: Hawke burns.

She’s holding fire in her cupped hand the first time he meets her. Later she lets it go, a bloom of light vanishing between her fingers; her smile blooms instead, like the heat at the leading edge of a storm, but he is desperate and she is willing, and when he asks she steps into the heart of a shadowed mansion and lights every corner of it blinding. When death is through, though, it diminishes in unexpected relief; he blinks away the afterimages through burning eyes, and he flees to the refuge of Kirkwall’s evening air where there is no smoke.

He should have known. There could be no other end to his life than this, his dependence once more on the same creatures as those who taught him the leash. One hand alight is the same as all the others.

—

She runs hot, he finds. Hot in everything: temper, temperature, her fingers scalding on his shoulder as she claps his back after a battle. He prods her selfishly, looking for the same spark of cruelty that lived in his master; often she snorts instead, or laughs like green branches breaking and snapping under their own heat. Sometimes she breaks with a shower of embers, one sharp crack and a sudden hot wash when he digs too sharply, but it never lasts long and there is never the rage in it that he expects.

It _will_ come. It always comes in the end—

He builds himself in Kirkwall all the same. Weak man, addicted to the warmth, even what dregs of it reach the shadows where he is crouched to tend this bitter, barren land he has claimed as his own. He is from Seheron’s jungles; he was made in the wild gold-baked Minrathous, and he knows best of them all the danger of rising heat.

—

This is what he learns over the years: given enough fuel, Hawke can be provoked past discipline. He sees it the first time after her brother is taken in the Deep Roads; he sees it again, months later, when a careless comment of his own throws oil on a spattering flame. She goes up like a greasefire, building higher and higher into a tower of fury that sends him startling back, hands raised in useless defense. But just as quickly—she is out again, and he is unharmed, and all that is left are the black scorchmarks on their history, saying: here they survived the burning.

More than one of those places behind them; yet more ahead, and it unsettles him to realize he does not fear their coming.

What he _does_ fear is what he refuses to acknowledge in the quick glances out of the corner of her eye, the way she begins to turn first to him after a battle, the way he slowly starts to listen for her above all others in the crush of steel and blood. It is a cautious thing, drawn unwilling from his history of scars, a slow simmer with reckless flares forward in a night of drunken confessions, in other hot, embarrassed moments over one of Isabela’s books in Hawke’s library.  He wishes she did not laugh so easily; it would be easier to hold away the heat of her if it did not catch on every one of his torn edges, an effortless warmth that licks at him and catches there and grows, and grows, and grows.

She touches his arm occasionally, after a fight with raiders or with each other, assuring herself that he is not hurt. Her fingers always scald regardless of the weather.

(He does the same, once, when a bandit’s sword has breached his guard and left her with a bleeding palm. A simple thing, no danger to her life, but the red flush that surges across her throat when he takes her wrist surprises him.)

(A cruel relief, to know that she is as weak as he.)

—

Then, all at once—

He does not want to die. He goes to her after Hadriana is dead because Hawke is _alive_ , and because she burns, and if he must burn with this bitterness and hate how much better that he have one with him who might stoke it into something hotter. He knows she wants him, _has_ wanted him; he is not so distant from his past that he cannot read desire in a mage’s face, and he is not so distant from himself that he does not know he wants her, too. To take the flame in the palm of his hand and hold it there, twisting, brilliant with heat, checked only by his command—

He is a fool.

He cannot even master himself; how could he think himself whole enough a man for this? He sweats in her arms like a field laborer baked beneath the sun; he closes his eyes and memories blaze behind his lids to blind him, a handful of seconds that stretch forever before they are gone again, nothing but shadow and a pressed hole in his mind where they glittered. Hawke arches beneath his lips, gasping pleasure; her fingers slide down his body to leave white sparks in their wake. She pulls her name from his mouth again and again, coals burning on his tongue.

It was better before. He was better before he knew this, before he realized he could not be strong enough to bear this _light_ —

He goes the moment he can stand. He cannot let her have all of him now; this field he has scraped together is fallow but it is _his_ , new, unturned—he barely knows yet whether it will hold life, and if he lets her sweep over him now in a fiery billow he will never know. It was the same with Danarius. He is so piecemeal a man he cannot yield only part of himself, and though she will not mean to consume him he can see himself already, bones gone black and cracking, head bent, hands outstretched for even more than that.

She will scorch him to ash, and he will cherish it. He must go.

He _must._

—

Here is what fire does not burn: cold dirt, the memory of pain, an iron shackle.

—

He puts his hand to the ripple of heat, says: _no_ , and she withdraws. Never gone, not completely; only licking at the edges, warmth and light never closer than he demands, even when the distance is farther than he wishes. It must be all or nothing for him and he is—

He is, at the heart of it, afraid.

—

She fears, too. He forgets that sometimes, that under the brash brassy hammer of her humor there is a girl who has set half her family to the pyre already.

Then her mother dies.

She is devastating like this, this towering rage that has seen only a handful of times: the spit and hiss of open flame from her fingertips, her eyes ablaze, her head thrown back in heat so strong the air wavers with it. This is when he learns temperance, that not all anger burns bright enough to give light, that a summerweight heat can writhe into itself, on and on, until even the slow-glowing embers that feed it are drained black and dead. Long after her mother’s body is put away and the fire lit and the ashes put in proper heat to mourn, Aveline says: Hawke will burn out if left alone.

Fenris knows this, too.

All the same, he is shocked to find her so doused when he goes upstairs. (Heat rises, always rises—) But she is bent, and dark, and small, like the dead things left behind after a forest fire; he does not know if this can be sparked again, not as it was. It must be a coaxing thing, slow and careful: a touch here, a smile there, one evening of cards, one sojourn to the Coast, where there are memories not drenched through with grief. It is slow going. He tries regardless, and slowly, hour by hour, day by day, month by month, the world begins to lighten again around her.

He is startled by the victory he feels the first time he makes her laugh, after, and the delight when she makes _him_ laugh in answer.

He is more startled to find that after tending the hearth so carefully for so long—he can no longer fear it.

—

The years pass, then. He steps back, watches her sputter and spit and swell into life again; watches her nearly be put out at his own words against the Arishok, only to manage to survive stubborn and hot-eyed as ever; watches her grow tall and proud into a beacon for a city that sorely needs one.

Watches her wait, eyebrows lifted above that burning smile, for him to welcome her at last.

And yet. There are bindings on him even she cannot break, and against both their wills he keeps himself apart. A little longer, he tells her, a month yet, a week, another hour. A slave does not own his heart. He has so little to offer her; he is determined to give her at least that.

(As if he has not given it to her already. The wicking candle of his bitterness has grown smaller with every passing year; he knows who lit that flame.)

—

Astonishing, how one step on a stair can bring back memories ten years removed, how one word can narrow his world from everything his friends have opened to the single point that is his master’s voice.

Cold terror in the pit of his gut. Grey robes, a grey beard, eyes like ice and as implacable—looking down on him as they always have. He had thought he was past this fear—

Then—

Warmth at his back, steady and growing, and the slow unfurling of heat in his chest from his heart outwards, like stepping from shadow into the sun.

—

He can see the hope in her. She’s alight in his rooms, flickering, looking up at him as if every word might be the one to send her soaring forward. How many reasons has he left to check her heart? More than enough—dozens, if he cares to count—but he’s had enough of waiting, enough of testing himself and her, enough of looking for a light to lead him when he’s held one in the palm of his hand for years. His word has kept the fire at bay; now, firetamer, he is ready to give himself to the pyre at last.

He is no Andraste, but he has no more excuses, no more fear; he opens his arms to the flame.

(All, or nothing—take it all. Take everything.)

It is not surrender. It is _triumph_.

—

Here is what fire does not burn: deep roots in good earth.

—

She loves him. He knew it already; she tells him all the same, over and over, until he is fairly glowing with the sound of it. He cannot pretend to understand why after all this time, after all she knows of him and his weakness and his fear and the many ways in which he is small. And yet—he knows these things of her too, and loves her just as fiercely despite them. Perhaps because of them.

Ten years since another has swept through him like this, a decade’s worth of mast a ready tinder for the spark she sets to light it. She cups his face and the earth blazes; she kisses him and the trees go up in smoke; she smiles at his touch and his blood races in his ears like a pillar of fire, roaring, roaring—

—

Afterwards—peace. The fire has come and taken his heart, and he has survived its taking. Let the rest fall where it will.

(How odd, then, to turn back at the end of it and find the field he thought burnt to ash had only had the roughage cleared, that beneath the bracken and black earth there sprang the pale new peeping of hundred green shoots.

How odd, that something so new could already be so strong.)

She says his name like a light with no shadow. He kisses her, smoke-sore and tender, and slides his fingers between her own until they are warm.


	40. Flower Meme, Pt. One (Hawke/Fenris)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The following series of prompts were written for citrusconcerto's very lovely flower meme prompts, which can be found [here.](http://loquaciousquark.tumblr.com/post/130978606652/flowers-and-prompts#notes)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 578  
**Prompt:** from servantofclio.

_Azalea: _fragile and ephemeral passion._ _

—

Hawke’s love is a killing thing.

Half her family is dead before she realizes. Then her brother nearly goes in her arms, sick and white and coughing blood into the dark, and the weight of the truth settles softly around her shoulders, a mantle of snow, just as cold. Even the Wardens cannot save him, not really; his death sentence is postponed, not commuted, and she knows him well enough to read his face as he turns away into the shadow. She has lost him as surely as her father and her sister, even if he breathes a little longer before dying.

Gamlen knows this too, sour and bitter as he is; he knows as well as she does that what she touches cannot live. He is the one she goes to after Fenris leaves that first night, not because she wants his gentleness (that comes from her mother, as little as it soothes) but because he _understands_ , because he knows better than all the others how it feels to try and fail.

(Isabela leaves them just as often. Aveline’s husband died, and Mother’s, and Anders’s lover–and Merrill is very sweet and cannot make out the meaning, even though she tries. Both Varric and Sebastian listen too well and see too much, and she’s still too bruised to talk without bleeding, and she can’t–she _can’t_.)

Better this way, he tells her, not meeting her eyes as he hands her back the bottle. Better to lose the love quick, before it can die on its own. Before they can die on you and leave you with the weight of what you’ve lost. It’s a fragile thing, that sort of feeling, and prone to a quick wither at the slightest step–and she has never had the touch to keep such delicate things alive.

Better this way. Surely…

So her mother dies, because Hawke cannot care for a thing without killing it, and because his affection is cruel Fenris comes to sit with her in the grief. She wants to shout, wants to shove him away before he’s taken as well–doesn’t he know what he does, coming here? _caring_?–but he does not go, and he doesn’t falter, even if the years keep distance between them neither of them wants. 

He does not die. Not that year, nor the next, nor the year after, and day by day the affection in her heart she cannot kill grows stronger. She would stop it if she could–all others, but not him, not _him–_ but as thin and pale and unfurling as it is it will not die, even under her clenching grip. The irony of her life, that the one thing she would kill to save refuses to give way before her.

So. The years pass, and she loves him, and one day his master dies and he grows free enough to love her, too. She warns him afterwards, when neither of them has permitted the other’s fear, when the flush of contentment and affection has grown familiar enough they may speak seriously through it and not weaken.

Fenris smiles. He kisses her without speaking, and all at once she realizes the unfurling thing in her heart has taken root without her noticing, grown strong enough that no storm could ever shake it loose, strong enough that not even she could kill it if she tried.

Better this way. Her love is a killing thing, but his, here–

His is strong enough for them both.

 

—

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 552  
**Prompt:** from bossuary.

_Zinnia: I mourn your absence._

_—_

He had known he’d miss her. He’d grieved before she’d even left, Varric’s cursed Inquisition pulling her sense of duty between them like a shield. But it’s been more than three months since he’s seen her face and their daughter is growing without her mother, and he–

He _misses_ her.

Their neighbors do not understand. They’d wondered when she’d left, whispers following him into the village with every step, _they looked so happy before, I heard she was ill, they say such things are common with marriages to elves, but what will happen to the child?  
_

He knows what will happen. The child will grow, and the rumors will change, and fade, and die, and then Hawke will return and they will surge again, made worse by their refusal to dispense details to every prying soul. Life will eventually resume, as normal as they can ever bear to be, and the village will be left with one more quiet mystery among its farms and rivers.

He knows this. And yet–

The weather changes, the air crisping, the leaves golding at the edges. Varric writes him now and then, spare letters of well-being, and day by day Fenris turns more and more often to the west where Skyhold lies beyond the mountains. He glances at his pack, at his sword where it hangs on the wall. He takes the milking goat to a lead and walks with her to the creek and back again, wondering.

Varric writes. Hawke does not. His daughter smiles at him as he takes her in his arms after a bath, and he realizes–such a small thing. Such a _small thing_ , their child’s smile.

Hawke has never seen it.

He leaves at dawn. The goat trails behind him, bell clanking with every step; Leda rests against his heart in the sling Hawke had made before she left, cheerfully cooing every time he glances down to meet her eyes. Occasionally wagons offer a ride when they pass the same direction; other days he walks dawn to dusk, resting only when his daughter can no longer bear the swaddle and demands to be fed from the patient goat.

They travel this way for two weeks. It is not the most arduous journey he has ever made, even with an infant in arms, and on the last morning he hires space in a wagon’s bed to carry them the last way up the mountain’s side, to the walls of the stronghold spreading up and away in every direction he can see, cage and guard and sanctuary for everything he holds most precious to him.

A simple thing to persuade the guards out of his way, to hide his daughter in the folds of his cloak like a parcel meant for keeping. A simple thing to stride into Skyhold’s great hall and find Hawke standing at the other end with the Inquisitor, her head turned at the commotion as he enters.

She breathes his name into the sudden silence, her eyes alight. Fenris’s heart is a soaring thing, even after the long and winding weight of their journey, and as he pulls the cloak away he sees her eyes drop to the baby he has brought half a continent to see her.

She covers her mouth. And Leda—smiles—

 

—

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** M  
**Word Count:** 450  
**Prompt:** from fourth-age.

_Forsythia: anticipation._

__—_ _

She’s still laughing when her fingers slip around his knee. Fenris does not startle so easily these days, now that he has become used to such things; even so, he cuts a sideways glance to find her grinning at him over her cards. He lifts an eyebrow, but her fingers only tighten before sliding an inch up his thigh, and Fenris returns his eyes to his own cards.

Isabela notices, because of course she does, but the rest of their friends seem thankfully too involved in their own hands or their own cups to tease them overmuch. Isabela even restricts herself to a pointed smile and wink before turning again to peering over Aveline’s shoulder; a generous gesture, and Fenris knows it. This _—_ what he has made here, with Hawke, is still too new for such open laughter, yet.

He discards three, and as Varric deals him the replacements Hawke’s fingers slip another inch or two before she squeezes his thigh gently. He keeps his eyes steadfastly on his cards, though he does drop a warning hand to her wrist _—_ for all the good it does, as a moment later her foot hooks around his ankle and begins to rub, back and forth, along his own.

“ _Hawke_ ,” he says in an undertone, hardly knowing what he wishes her to do. She only folds, tossing her cards to the center with a delighted laugh, and leans back in her chair so that her shoulder brushes his. Across the table Donnic is frowning at his empty cup, one among the dozens of other empty cups scattered across the table, and Merrill and Sebastian have somehow begun arguing over some aspect of the Angel of Death’s embroidered robe.

Varric raises the pot by three silver, and Fenris throws his coin in without the slightest awareness of his cards. Hawke’s fingers have begun to trace circles on the inside of his thigh, edging ever higher, and when she turns to rest her chin on his shoulder his blood gives a lazy thrum of anticipation.

“Fenris,” she murmurs, her lips barely brushing his ear, “how badly do you want to win this round?”

His eyes flicker closed, just for a moment. “You are drunk.”

“So are you.”

He laughs despite himself, and as Isabela lays down her winning hand with a flourish, Hawke’s palm at last slides inward to cup him gently and with no doubt of her intention.

“Fenris,” she says into his ear, thick with promise and laughter both, “come home with me, will you?”

He shakes his head, amazed at his own eagerness _—_ but he does, willingly, and neither of them minds Isabela’s quiet teasing as they go together into the coolness of the night.

 

_—_

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke, Orana  
**Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 450  
**Prompt:** from seekenpalmeres.

_Yarrow: cure for a broken heart._

__—_ _

The estate rattles after her mother’s death. It’s not just that it’s become too large; she’s become too _small_ , a hard little broken rock cast into the emptiness, ricocheting off stone floors and wood walls and chipping at every blow.

She should have known. She locks up her mother’s room, as if that might lessen the space she can’t fill–but it doesn’t help, the pit still just as yawning in her heart, the knowledge as present in her mind as if the locked door were nothing more than a curtain blown back in a gentle breeze.

How dare the world go on? How can the markets open every morning as if her life has not ended; how can the same Chantry bells ring dolour for her mother’s funeral and then the next day find all the bright, brassy joy for the birth of a child, for a wedding? How unfair, that her dawns should be the only ones made dim by sorrow.

She is too selfish for grief. Fenris tries, and it–helps, a little, for that night, and then he goes and she stays and the next morning comes and her mother is still dead. And the morning after, and the morning after, and the morning after that, and every time the wound startles, as deep as when it was fresh, and she thinks–she cannot _live_ like this.

One night when she is rattling worse than usual, she goes into her kitchen and sits down at the empty table in her mother’s place. The room is dark, no candles yet lit, and she does not know how long she sits there without moving, without thinking, listening to the loss echoing in her heart.

And then–quietly, without fuss, Orana enters, candle in hand, and lights the bracket above the stove, and the pillar in the center of the table, and then she pulls out a pot and open a cabinet door, and she begins to make soup.

Hawke does not move, watching her in the silence. Orana moves with surety, with grace, her fingers steady as she measures and pours and stirs, the room slowly filling with the smell of sage and thyme and a sweet, spicy broth. It is not until she ladles out the first bowl that Hawke realizes she is crying, has been crying for some time; it is not until she takes the first sip that the knot bound so tightly behind her ribs begins to loosen, even in the smallest part.

“Mistress,” Orana says softly, taking the seat beside Hawke, her own bowl in hand, gentle curls of steam escaping into the warm kitchen. “May I tell you about my papa?”

Hawke nods, too heartsore to speak, and Orana does, each word filling the air, sound by sound, until the rattling emptiness at last begins to yield.


	41. Flower Meme, Pt. Two (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 500  
**Prompt:** from shadoedseptmbr and marigoldfaucet.

_Persimmon: bury me amid nature’s beauty._

—

They buy a cottage in Wilhaven. It’s small, far smaller than the Kirkwall estate, but it’s sound and strong and has room for a garden and a small yard for chickens and goats, and within the month Hawke has already coaxed the weed-choked earth to yield a variety of herbs and flowers Fenris does not recognize. Neither does he understand this fascination of hers with dirt, not truly, but she is happy and thus he is happy, too, and he supposes there are worse Fereldan habits than harmless gardening.

She begins to hang dried herbs from the lintels above all the windows, cheerful bunches of green tied with twine and ribbon. The sills she decorates with small pots of flowers, purple and gold and white, small blossoms he cannot name, others with strange, familiar scents and words on his tongue with different sounds than those she gives.

He accuses her once of domesticity, one night when they sit on the small sofa together, her back against his chest, one leg thrown over his, her rounding stomach the prop for the book they both read, chapter by chapter. She only laughs, low and glad, and asks, _do you mind_?

He does not. It is a strange thing, slave as he is: married, a house in his own name as well as hers, a child expected by midsummer. He has no reference for such things, no world where this might ever be expected for such a person as he is; even here he wakes with nightmares of blood, memories of his violence, hearts he has crushed and regretted. So does she.

They both know this is only a temporary peace, no matter how much they might wish otherwise. They are people of violence, both of them, death in their hands and at their backs. This calm is only borrowed; even now there are rumors of disquiet in the west, a Conclave, Varric’s letters increasingly vague and increasingly disturbed. This will not last.

And yet, when he looks up one afternoon from the kitchen sink where he washes the last of the lunch dishes, he sees Hawke on her knees in the garden, her hair tied away from her face as she coaxes the young tomato plant to grow more closely to the trellis she’s built for it. She ties the last knot, looks up at the window as if she feels his gaze; one hand comes to rest on her stomach as the other shades her eyes, and then she gives him a brilliant, beaming smile that makes his breath catch even through glass and shadow. Beautiful. She is—

This will not last. He knows this. And he knows, too, that no matter what the next month brings, the next year, there is no doom in this world or the next that will ever touch the sight of this moment here, Hawke kneeling in herbs and small flowers colored purple and gold and white, dirt smeared across her cheek, smiling bright enough to dim the day.

 

—

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 560  
**Prompt:** from anonymous.

_Sweet pea: delicate pleasures._

—

Fenris, she discovers, has a taste for fine things. Expensive food, expensive wine; if given the choice he will have his clothing cut to the latest fashions, trim and strong and made from good cloth. The knowledge is somewhat at odds with her perceptions of him, given the general squalor in which he lives, but—time tells all, and over the years Hawke learns that in some things Fenris can be remarkably fastidious.

He refuses, however, to admit it. Nor will he permit gifts of any real cost, even if she knows how much he desires the new belt, or the cloak in Jean-Luc’s window, or the newest volume of the mystery series he enjoys done up in fine, embossed leather and gilt-edged pages. Even holidays and celebrations are difficult occasions despite their generous nature, and the few occasions she makes the mistake of choosing gifts too costly she’s caught off-guard by Fenris’s prickly, edged gratitude instead of the unfettered delight she expects.

She asks him, years later, when they are both deep in their cups and there’s enough trust built between them to know he will not run. He does not answer at first, thumb running along the edge of his wineglass pensively; then he lifts one shoulder in a shrug and drains the glass in one swallow.

So many reasons. Too many to be properly laid end to end and sorted in one conversation, though he tries for her, because she has asked. Danarius’s tastes, the earliest of his memory; he is comforted by their familiarity, the fine things he was raised among. He despises them for the same reason–but _is_ that his taste, or another thing Danarius molded in his creation? He does not know; neither does Hawke.

He tells her also, in halted, stilting words, of his unfamiliarity with gifts in general. The small things he is prepared to accept with equanimity, the useful tools any soldier might give another to maintain their survival; it is the softer gifts he does not understand, the reciprocal nature of such things paralyzing to him who has never known before why one would _wish_ to give such useless trinkets to their lovers.

_Until now_ , Hawke says, her heart hurting, and when Fenris looks away she stands, and goes to kneel beside him on the sofa, and holds his hand until he meets her eyes again.

_I love you_ , she says plainly, watching his eyelids flutter, and then she says it again, and again, until he takes her face in his hands and kisses her. That is all the gifts mean when she gives them, she tells him: the book, the whetstone, the ridiculous hat she knows he will never wear. No expectation, no catch. No truth other than that her heart is his, than that she thinks of him when she gathers these things. All that matters.

He listens intently, though he does not reply, and when she is finished he only nods. She does not know if he understands, if she has made any difference at all, but–she has told him. That must be enough.

(Three days later, she wakes to an empty bed and a small bundle of wildflowers tied with twine on the pillow beside her head. She only cries a little, and he does not ask why when she comes downstairs and kisses him without a word.)

 

—

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 500  
**Prompt:** from locketofyourhair.

_Quince: temptation._

—

_My magic will serve that which is best in me, not that which is most base._ Her father says it often while she is young, often enough she begins to know the way he will breathe before the the words. By the time she is twelve it is part of her memory; by the time she is sixteen it has no meaning, a rhythm familiar as water, a lullaby for the tone if nothing else.

What has she to be afraid of? She is young and fearless and without regrets. There is no demon’s offer in the world to sway her, who wants for nothing.

And then—

And then, year by year, the world teaches her loss. She grows older. She learns fear; she gathers regrets like wildflowers, one by one, braiding them into a cloak she carries with her always, tucked into the crook of her arm.

Her armor chinks and cracks, footholds in her skin where there were none before, tiny places for a demon’s whisper to catch and hold, to pull her open a little wider every time. _My magic will serve—_

Fenris does not understand. She does not expect him to, not at first. He is no mage, after all, and even if the understanding is closer after Feynriel, he is still oceans from the nightly whispers in her soul. She was fearless, once.

By her thirtieth birthday she has killed her sister and her mother with her own failure, murdered men and women beyond counting, and sparked a war in her heart’s home, violence rippling outwards until the whole of the nation is consumed. Strangers speak her name in mixed admiration and revulsion; men she has never met curse her in the same breath as the Betrayer. She was made for grain fields and Fereldan mud; what does she know of worlds like this, where rulers of countries come to her door and ask for aid?

Fenris asks her, once, on a night where she has woken in a cold sweat and startled him with the gasp. She does not know how to explain it to a man who is not a mage, a man with no past; there are no words in her for the immense, unbearable longing every time they take the sunlit farmhouse from her memories and fill it with the souls she lost long ago. She has fought for so long to keep the precious things she can. Impossible to explain that the simplest whispers are the strongest against her will.

Still. She tries, and Fenris listens, and when she is finished he takes her in his arms and presses his lips to her temple. It is no answer, not the way he means it, but–it is enough.

_My magic will serve that which is best in me._ A lullaby for the dreaming. She had forgotten.

She closes her eyes again, listening to Fenris’s heartbeat, and when she dreams again that night, she is strong enough to murmur, if only one more time— _no_.

 

—

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 565  
**Prompt:** from uatu-watches, playswithdinos, and lastcousland.

_Witch hazel: a spell._

_—_

The lyrium can always tell.

Even from the first days of his memory, he has known the taste of magic. Danarius’s had been subtle and sharp, the edge of a hooked blade; it had grown darker when he needed blood, like rust, and every pulse through his veins had been thick with the weight of iron when his master called for his use.

A volatile thing, too; Danarius’s temper could flicker black in an instant if he did not guard, and the magic would go with it, lyrium scars heavy as shackles themselves under their coursing. For many years, he had not known there was any other way.

Merrill’s magic carries the same rust, even if she refuses to see it. He tastes the iron tang every time she casts, salt and blood rippling through the lyrium in a familiar pattern, though hers carries earth with it instead of steel. Hers is stronger, too, in a way Danarius’s never was; not a sharp strength but a blunt, straightforward, inexorable power, a rooted thing that pries into stone over eons and crushes it.

He knows himself well enough to admit he fears her. Such a small, slender woman to hide such power; so blithe in the face of demons he has watched best greater mages than she. She is stronger than even she realizes, and she will not see it.

Anders sees too much. Fenris does not like his magic, cold and pitiless as a winter wave, touched with the alien strangeness of the spirit that lives in him. He has never felt anything like it, precise as a surgeon’s knife and as ready to wound as heal. Even his healing is bitter, potent as it is. No other can magic his wounds closed so well they will not scar, no matter the depth; no other can leave him chilled to the bone from nothing more than a touch. The lyrium knows Anders does not like him.

And Hawke—

He does not understand the first time her magic washes through him. She is hot—but she is always hot, and if the lyrium leaps in the scars to welcome the touch it is only his starvation for gentleness after so many cruel years. It is only the absence of pain that sends him yearning, nothing more; it is only the Fereldan in her, warm and wild and welcoming as she would be to any desperate soul throwing himself on her mercy, no mark on him to set him apart from the rest.

So he tells himself, but the lyrium knows her better than his heart, and as the years pass more grows in the touch of her magic than only heat. Too long to recognize it, longer still to bear its naming—but Fenris has known magic since the first days of his memory. He can turn away only so long.

She gives him the words of it, eventually, when his fear is dead at last and there is no touch of iron left inside his skin. He knows; he has felt it for years, singing fierce and hot in his veins with every touch of her magic, even when she did not speak.

She laughs when he tells her, rueful delight. She says it again all the same, her mouth on his, and the lyrium gleams, steady and unfaltering, with every beat of his heart.


	42. A Patchwork (Carver, Varania, Fenris/Hawke)

**Characters/Pairing:** Varania, Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** G  
**Word Count:** 1555  
**Prompt:** from anonymous: "Hey, I was wondering if you have any headcanons about Leda and Carver? Or what kind of uncle do you think Carver would be? Also, for some reason the thought of Carver and Varania in the same room amuses me greatly. Family get togethers would be interesting lol. I also just wanted to drop by and say that I love your works! Have an awesome week!"

 **Notes:** This just in: I still love Varania. Like, a lot.

—

Varania answers the door. 

Carver pauses, his hand still raised from the knock. Then he takes two steps back down the cottage’s worn, tiny porch into the crisp winter air, shades his eyes, and double-checks the lane for any other isolated homes at the edge of the woods he might have missed. 

Nothing. And now Varania’s mouth has thinned, one pointed eyebrow raised as he looks back to her again. The wind catches hollowly in his cloak, and Carver says, “Ah.”

There’s a loud slam from somewhere deep in the house, a distant, muffled curse, and then the tramping of tiny feet growing quickly louder, accompanied by one of the most ominous giggles he’s ever heard. A chaotic flash of green shirt and a short black braid skids around the corner; a moment later Leda careens into her aunt’s knees, laughing wildly, and buries her face in Varania’s skirts. 

The severity gives way all at once in Varania’s face. She doesn’t smile, not quite, but there’s a softening there Carver can’t quite believe as one hand drops gently to Leda’s head. “I suppose you might as well—” she says at last, but before she can finish a taller figure comes to the end of the hallway as well, still sputtering something between half-oaths and barely stifled laughter.

His sister. More precisely, his sister with an infant in one arm and what appears to be two solid pounds of dirt cascading down the rest of her, caught in dry clods in her hair and on her shoulders, a dark spill trailing behind her into the hall. “Carver!” she says without preamble, her eyes alight. “Thank the Maker, another set of arms.”

“What—” he manages, right before she thrusts the infant into his hands and stalks out past them all into the cold air of the yard, bending at the waist and shaking her fingers vigorously through her hair. Earth sprays free in enthusiastic showers over the thin snow; when she’s at last shed the worst of it, his sister straightens, ties her hair into a tight knot at the back of her head, and stares directly at her daughter.

“Well.”

Leda sidles further behind Varania, one green eye peeking out from behind her skirts. “Mama.”

“What did I say about that shelf?”

“Don’t reach for it while you’re planting,” Leda repeats dutifully, though she takes another half-step behind her aunt. 

“What else?”

“Don’t pull on the nail.”

“And what did you do?”

Now she glances at Carver, no trace of even the faintest remorse in her expression. “Pulled out the nail. Hi, Uncle Carver!”

“Little troublemaker,” he says instead, grinning, and adjusts the baby’s weight better against his chest. Only four months old, still new, and blinking sleepily into the pale, clear sunlight in vague protest. “Look what you did to your mother. Even by my standards, it’s impressive.”

“Don’t you encourage her,” his sister warns, though even he can see the humor twinkling behind the sternness as she stalks towards her wayward daughter. “Inside. Now. Straight to your room, and don’t you _dare_ give me that look, you little _pest_ —”

They’re gone around the corner again in short order, Leda’s protests whining faintly through the house, Hawke’s lower answers even-toned, without yield. Carver grins again, his eyes flicking up to meet Varania’s own stifled smile; then the strangeness of the moment settles around them again, and after a stilted silence, she shrugs both shoulders and turns again into the warmth of the house. 

“Lunch is nearly ready,” she says, leading him to the sitting room and pausing there before the merry fireplace, ungainly in her uncertainty, still as pale as he remembers from so many years ago. “My brother is—should be—he should return from town soon.” 

“Of course,” Carver says, just as graceless, and sits awkwardly with his nephew on the edge of the couch. At least he hadn’t traveled in armor; as it is, the Warden-issue cloak stifles once out of the winter winds, and it takes some doing to free himself of it without jostling the infant beginning to doze against his chest. “You, uh—have you been here long?”

“Since last week.” A pause as she adjusts some small, carved statue on the mantel. “I was invited. For the season.”

“Of course,” he says again. “My sister asked me to come, too. Just for a week or so. Warden business, you know. Can’t…can’t leave it for too long.”

“Of course,” Varania echoes, and for a moment Carver seriously considers wheeling his horse right back towards Amaranthine if it will free him from this conversation. Then Varania shifts, an odd ripple to her shoulders as if shaking off a weight, and she nods to the baby in Carver’s arms. “Have you met him before?”

“No,” he says, grateful for the offering, and looks down at the tiny fists clenched at his own throat, the straight nose, the dark hair. “He looks more like Fenris than Leda does.”

“I thought so, also.”

The baby shifts, blinks, and gives an enormous yawn. “You’ve got that right, boyo,” he tells him softly. “Turn out half like your sister and this house’ll be burnt to cinders by your fifth birthday.”

Varania makes an odd, curious sound, and he looks up in time to see her brow furrow, then clear. “Oh,” she adds, obviously embarrassed by his scrutiny, and waves a hand in dismissal. “I remembered. Once, with Leto…”

Carver lifts an eyebrow despite himself, and when the baby yawns again, he settles back into the couch and crosses one booted foot over his knee. “Share away. If you like, I mean. Not that I’m _looking_ for blackmail material, but if blackmail material happens to find _me_ …”

“You sound like your sister,” Varania says, tucking a bit of escaped red hair back into her bun, but there’s no rancor in it. “Once, when we were young, we were sent to wash linens in a stream that ran alongside our master’s estate. Slaves’ things, of no import,” she adds, misinterpreting his grimace, and continues. “Neither of us wished to work. I found some—rocks, or some such thing, and played with those, but Leto had recently watched the master’s hunters in the yard and decided he would make a fire from sticks as they had.”

Now she smiles, caught in the memory, and Carver’s own amusement dims at the difference of it. Too hard to see the weight she carries until it is wholly forgotten, if only for a moment. He shakes his head, shakes off the despondency. “Don’t tell me he succeeded.”

“He has always learned quickly. He learned this too, to his own surprise, and in short order had set fire to the stick, the dry leaves surrounding the stick, and his own shirt.”

His mind rejects the image of Fenris as a child; instead it provides a brief but vivid glimpse of Fenris as he is, only half as tall, beating wildly at his own chest. He can’t suppress the guffaw. “No.”

“Oh, yes. I pushed him into the stream. To save him, of course.”

“Of course,” Fenris says dryly from the doorway, pulling the scarf from his neck.

Varania lifts her chin, humor still playing at her mouth. “ _You_ question my memory?”

“Only your motivation,” he retorts, and barely drops the market bag out of the way before Leda flings herself bodily into his arms. “What have you done? Why are you covered in dirt?”

“I pulled out the nail, Papa,” Leda states, and points with the hand not wrapped around her father’s neck to the kitchen. “Mama says lunch is ready!”

He laughs—still such an odd sound after all these years—and when Varania goes to the kitchen to help lay the table Fenris comes to where Carver still sits on the couch, his daughter’s arms tangled in the collar of his half-clasped cloak, his infant son still asleep against Carver’s chest. “Carver. It’s good to see you.” 

“Fenris,” he says, standing, and manages to free a hand to clasp the one Fenris offers. “Didn’t know your sister was coming.”

Sudden, faint wariness, not enough to cast a shadow. “Hawke suggested a family gathering for the holiday. She was…insistent.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says abruptly. “Glad she could make it. For Leda’s sake, if nothing else.”

“For my sake,” Leda agrees staunchly, a streak of dirt across one cheek, and Fenris laughs again. 

It’s a good sound, he decides, following them into the kitchen where Varania sets the glasses at the table, where his sister stands over a cheerful, bubbling stew—his sister, who has gathered together this impossible patchwork family for the holidays despite all the odds against them. Despite the history, too.

His nephew stirs, grabs vaguely for his chin, and gives his uncle a toothless, delighted smile. 

Carver grins. He’s glad she did.


	43. A Trap for Bears (Fenris/Hawke, Sebastian)

**Characters/Pairing:** Fenris/Hawke, Sebastian, Anders  
**Rating:** T  
**Word Count:** 5500  
**Prompt:** Hurt/comfort, Hawke gets caught in a bear trap. I put up a list of various plot bunnies I had, and this one was the most popular oneshot idea. 

**Notes:** Mild canon-typical violence. 

—

“Be careful,” Sebastian murmurs. “There are many traps in this area.”

“How astutely observed,” Hawke replies, grinning at his back as he kneels next to yet another length of fine copper wire stretched across one of the cave’s tunnels. “Flames, with all the tripwires and hidden piles of rocks and the way the floor back there opened into that _really_ deep pit, I’d never have guessed.”

“A little patience, if you please.”

“I’m a _paragon_ of patience.”

“Hawke,” Fenris says, more than a little warning in his tone, but that’s the exact moment the wire gives a little _snick_ under Sebastian’s fingers and falls away to the leaf-strewn floor, harmless. 

“There, see? No harm done.” She extends a hand to help Sebastian to his feet again, staggering only a little as he draws up to his full height. “Right? A little impatient nagging never hurt anyone.”

Sebastian gives a rueful smile as he accepts his bow again from Anders, a ritual performed so many times this afternoon she’s already lost count. “I confess, Hawke, I was doing my best to ignore you.”

“Cheeky.”

He gives a little half-bow in answer, eyes twinkling, and turns again to the tunnel. “Shall we continue?”

“After you, my lord,” Hawke says, ignoring Fenris’s snort, and lets him lead them again through the caves.

They’re very nice caves, actually. They’ve been through them before over the years, long, dry tunnels connecting a handful of enormous caverns where a river once ran in another age. The whole system runs near enough to Sundermount’s surface that open air breaks through in regular intervals, filtering down in slanted, dusty shafts of sunlight from the caverns’ vine-choked upper edges, illuminating the brown and grey tunnels in unfairly pleasant warmth for how dangerous these raiders have made them. Part of the reason there always seems to be some new group discovering them, Hawke supposes, though these latest are rather more ruthless than most.

Sebastian’s hand comes up once more, and Hawke doesn’t bother to stifle her sigh as he sets about disarming _yet another_ trap. A footplate this time, hidden under a bit of brush and dirt, and a suspended pair of logs embedded with metal shards and nailheads a little further along the path. “Maker,” she says, and drapes an obnoxiously heavy arm around Anders’s shoulders. “Can you believe it? You’d think they actually don’t want visitors at this rate.”

Anders snorts. “You never know, Hawke. It might be personal.”

“Personal! I’m personally offended, if that’s the case.”

“You’ll have to tell them when we see them.”

“More than that,” Hawke mutters, and Sebastian pushes to his feet again. A few yards down the hall, the line leading to the logs swings free and loose, its cut edge dangling into open air. “Probably shouldn’t pull on that, then, right?”

Anders shakes her off, a few feathers floating loose with the gesture, and strides to meet Sebastian where he waits ahead, his white armor still irritatingly pristine. “Just let us get past before you do.”

“Not a single one of you has a proper appreciation for adventure,” Hawke says, though Fenris graciously allows her to take his hand as she falls into step with him, and he doesn’t even comment on the awkward interlocking of their gauntlets. “My favorite healer, my favorite priest, and my favorite Fenris, and not one of you willing to step out of your comfortable homes even once for a little wholesale slaughter.”

Neither Anders nor Sebastian dignifies that with a response. Fenris at least deigns to give her a small chuckle and a roll of his eyes, which, frankly, Hawke counts as a win, but by the next turn in the tunnel he’s taken his hand back for practical sword-wielding purposes, and by the next turn after that even she’s fallen victim to the ominous silence of the trapped caves. Sebastian stops them twice more for tripwires, though neither of them takes long to disarm, and then―

The tunnel opens without warning to the largest cavern of the system. They’re high on an upper ledge, the whole floor laid out thirty feet or so below; the stone-carved path continues around to their right before curving down the wall to the bottom level, fortified here and there by wooden support pillars and a haphazard attempt at a safety fence.

More important, however, is that every single one of the forty or so raiders they’ve been tracking is camped directly below them.

Hawke immediately goes to her knees, then to her stomach. Decades of brush and detritus cover the path here, blown by the steady cave winds and occasional rainfall through the patchwork roof, and she leaves a crooked trail through the dead leaves as she edges to the lip of the ledge, moving as carefully as she can without risking either fall or discovery. Fenris is close behind, a solid, comforting weight; Sebastian and Anders wait at the mouth of the tunnel, Anders too heavy-footed and Sebastian too eye-catching for the moment. Her eyes dart from group to group, small clusters of the raiders tending their weapons or roasting rats on small, turning spits; others turn towards a returning trio at the main mouth of the cavern, the stunted grass and sunlit shale of Sundermount visible just beyond the edge of open rock. Thirty―forty―forty-five―

“Too many,” Fenris breathes in her ear. “We’ll need to return with the guard.”

“At _least_. And maybe a few dozen grenades, if Varric can spare the stores.”

“Look.” He nods towards the far wall where a handful of raiders sit in one of the many patches of sunlight filtering through the grass-lipped gaps and holes in the ceiling. The light catches on the staves across their knees, laid on the ground behind their backs; even as they watch one unwraps another from a heavy broadcloth, the knotted wood’s polish glinting even from across the cavern. “Mages. And no small number of them.”

“Definitely the guard.”

Fenris inclines his head, then slides back a few inches before pushing to his feet. Hawke watches a moment more before following, and when she’s sure she’s well away from the visibility of the edge she stands herself, dusting off her thighs and knees where the leaves cling. “We’re done here for now,” she murmurs to the others. “We’ve got their hideout; we’ll gather reinforcements and come back first thing in the morning. Any objections?”

“None at all,” Anders tells her, fingering his own staff, and Hawke takes one step towards them.

She doesn’t remember, later, exactly how it all happens. She knows Sebastian’s face changes in an instant from relief to horror as her heel comes down; she knows Fenris gives some inarticulate sound of warning; she knows at the last instant she sees the teeth, thick and iron, jutting from the brush where the movement of her passing has uncovered them.

Then the trap snaps closed around her calf with a blunt, implacable _thud_ , and there’s only one thought in her head.

 _Don’t scream. Don’t scream. Don’t scream_.

―

She doesn’t scream. Instead she goes instantly, terribly calm, every part of her conscious mind preparing for the agony that will follow through the shock. The thing is oval-shaped and enormous, designed for bears and large game instead of humans; the iron is more than a quarter inch thick, the long teeth rusted and blunt, meant not to sever but to cripple and grip until the hunters can claim their prey.

It’s gripping her about three inches south of her right knee.

She knows the leg is broken. The serrated teeth are not sharp, but they’ve crushed down on either side of her leg like a thousand tons of cold malevolence. Her leather boot has split in three places she can see, the pressure of the teeth bearing impossibly, impossibly deep into flesh and muscle, and―

Ah, she thinks distantly. _There’s_ the pain.

_Don’t. Scream._

She fists a hand against her mouth instead. And then Fenris is there at her feet, and Sebastian, rolling their weight onto levers and springs that refuse to give, and some corner of her terrible calmness notes that at least the sound of iron through leather has not carried into the echoing cavern, the raiders still remain blessedly unaware of their intrusion. Better this way. Iron on iron would have been alarm itself, and the resultant fight would have―

The world fades into grey agony when Sebastian hefts her into his arms. It returns just enough for her to see Fenris at his side as they hurry back into the tunnel, the weight of the trap braced against his arm and the broken chain wrapped twice around his wrist to keep from jangling; but each step is a lightning strike to the place where she’s trapped, and she loses the next minutes behind the shock of every jolting stride.

Voices. Another shift as she’s laid roughly against sand and stone, another silent, open-mouthed gasp against the pain. _Don’t―_

A hand cups her chin. She can’t tell whose. “Be still. Don’t move.”

“Don’t move, Hawke.”

“Look. They’ve broken the release springs. We need―”

“No time.”

“Move. Let me.”

“Push now. _Harder_.”            

Even with the disjointed urgency, their voices don’t rise above a whisper. They must―they must still be close, and Hawke puts a hand over her own mouth, just in case. Her leg has begun to throb, deep, pulsing beats with every hammer of her heart. Someone is―wrenching―

She barely swallows the groan in time. Her breath comes harder instead, unwilling voice on every inhale, faster and faster as the yanks do not _stop_. She can’t―she’s too―there’s red agony rocketing from her leg through her spine to the back of her skull and she _can’t_ ―

The pain gives way just for an instant, just long enough for her to gulp down air and for the grey-stone ceiling of the tunnel to come into focus again. Then Anders is there, wavering at the edges, saying something she can’t make out through the roaring in her ears.

She blinks. Blinks again, and he leans even closer. “Listen to me. Hawke, _look_ at me. They’ve broken the release springs on the trap. Sebastian can’t get it open that way. We’re going to try to pry it apart enough to pull you free, but we’re still very close to the raiders. You must _stay quiet_. Do you understand?”

She opens her mouth, swallows air through her fingers as she scrabbles for the shreds of her preternatural calmness. Her answer is more breath than word. “Yes.”

“Do you want something to bite?”

“Yes.”

In a moment he has part of the cuff of his boot unstrapped. She remembers the fight that’d damaged that boot―she’d meant to help him mend it―and then a thick piece of black leather slides between her teeth, tasting of sweat and dirt and blood. “Bite down. Don’t move. Do you hear me, Hawke? Do not move.”

So many people telling her not to move. She flutters a hand, realizes― _moving_ ―and digs her fingers as hard into the dirt as she can. Ten fingers. Count to ten. One, two, three, four―

A white flood of pain roars over her at five, buffeting her senses enough she misses most of what happens next. All she sees is one image of Fenris and Sebastian standing on either side of her leg, one foot each braced against the iron teeth just beside her calf, their mailed hands curled around the upper teeth and straining, straining. They stay like this long enough she has time to think _I will lose my leg after this_ ―and then all at once Fenris’s tattoos burst into silent, brilliant light from chin to ankle, and she feels the pressure give way around her leg.

It’s a hideous feeling. It’s more hideous to watch the teeth rise and the deep divots in her leg remain, the leather of her boot contouring to the heavy dent where her shinbone used to be. She can’t feel her foot.

Another image: Anders’s hands around her knee, pulling. It should hurt; distantly it does through the stillness in her head, and then for an instant her vision goes abruptly black. It returns in time to see her booted toes come free of the teeth, every vein and ridge in Sebastian’s and Fenris’s throats pulled sharp. Fenris says something to Sebastian―ferocious control, even now―and Sebastian closes his eyes before slowly―slowly―slowly loosening his grip and sliding his armored foot out of the trap’s teeth.

Fenris does not hold it a moment longer alone. The instant Sebastian is free Fenris’s hands and feet lose their grip on reality, slipping into the otherworldly blue Hawke has seen most often with the dislodging of hearts. But here it is for iron instead, and with its last resistance gone the trap snaps shut through Fenris’s ghostly wrists on―nothing at all.

The clang is not quite loud enough to echo. It’s still louder than anything they’ve done yet, and a vague sense of concern blooms in the back of Hawke’s mind. _Don’t scream. Be quiet. Don’t scream._

 _Don’t move_.

Someone has her arms, a hand behind her head. The agony soars to the top of her brain again as she’s lifted, and somewhere she’s lost the leather strip and her palm’s not enough to quiet the harsh gasps through her teeth. White armor, smooth jaw; an archer’s calluses in the hard grip on her arm. Sebastian.

She hopes someone has remembered her father’s staff. Then Fenris hisses a word and Sebastian breaks into a run, and the pain swallows her down into the dark.

―

Awareness returns as she’s shifted again from Sebastian’s arms to the ground. Cold, slightly damp earth and the smell of grass―and the sun above her through a pair of pine trees, just as cheerful as when they set out and throbbing now behind her eyes. There’s movement on both sides of her, heads twisting in and out of her peripheral vision. She doesn’t try to follow them, but she has enough of her senses to realize they are not whispering any longer. The strange calm has completely vanished, leaving nothing but fear and rolling pain.

Are they away from the cave’s entrance? She can’t tell. “Where…” she tries, just as someone brushes against her ankle, and every thought is lost to the strangle of a swallowed scream.

“Hawke.” Anders again, more blurred than before. “Don’t move.”

 _Again_.

She doesn’t move. She’s dizzy with agony and adrenaline and someone’s fingers on her forehead and the biting strain of every heaved breath, and she couldn’t even if she wanted―

“Here. Is this it?”

“Show me. Do you have enough? Good. Mash it together with your fingers and put it under her tongue. The faster it’s in the blood, the better.”

Someone’s forcing her mouth open. She jerks her head away, stifles the cry at her jolted leg, and jerks again at the second touch. Then the hands gentle on her cheeks, and she blinks again, trying to see through the grey fog―

Fenris. She recognizes him now, his head bent very close, his mouth taut with worry. “Hawke. Be still. I am not trying to hurt you.”

Of course not. This time when he opens her mouth she allows it, does not fight the placement of the bitter, spine-leafed herbs beneath her tongue. He closes her mouth again, still just as gentle, and strokes one finger up and down her neck until she swallows. By then her spit has begun to soak through the herbs and her tongue has begun to tingle; she swallows again through the sensation, and Fenris gives her a tense smile. “Good.”

 _Good_ , she tries to echo, and then someone―Anders―pulls on the leather of her crushed boot and her back arches violently enough to bend her from the grass. Fenris’s hands slip twice as he tries to steady her; he snarls something over his shoulder and the pull―stops, though lingering echoes still thrum up and down the right side of her body. She can’t catch her breath.

Ridiculous. She’s been hurt before, hasn’t she? Hazy memories of the Arishok’s blade and an odd, lifting weight behind her ribs, taking her with it―but this is immediate and overwhelming as a hurricane, beating over and over without relief, and she can’t separate her mind from the wild screaming panic at the pain.

 _Stop_ it. She’s stronger than this. “It hurts.”

Fenris leans over her again, the fingers of one hand sliding around the back of her neck. His skin is blessedly cool. “I know. Anders must remove the boot, Hawke. It will hurt again.”

“Knock me out.”

“The only way to do that now would be to hit you.”

Somehow she manages a breathless laugh. “Hit away.”

“Look at me,” he says instead, and when she does he cups her head with his other hand as well. She hadn’t even noticed him removing his gauntlets. “Breathe in. Hold it. And―out―”

She feels the edge of the knife slide under the boot on the exhale, and as she breathes out with Fenris the first edge of the boot gives way. It hurts, but―it _helps_ , having Fenris there, holding her face, fixing her attention on his eyes and nothing else. “Again,” he says quietly, and she lets out another long, slow breath.

The rest of her mouth has begun to tingle, along with the tips of her fingers and toes. She lets herself focus on that instead of the ebbing edge of panic, on the slow lethargy seeping through her limbs, the waves of heat rising and receding in her leg with every breath and every pull of Anders’s knife. She doesn’t know how long it lasts. Long enough for the shadows in Fenris’s eyes to change, anyway. Long enough that the ground beneath her warms with magic and cools again, damp seeping through her coat.

Anders’s voice sounds very far away. “I’ve got most of it cut off, Hawke. You’ll feel me pull, and then I’m going to touch your leg. Are you ready?”

She thinks she nods. Fenris nods for her in any case, his thumbs tracing her jawline on both sides, and she relaxes back into the tide of hurt as it swells. Then she feels the boot slide over her heel and the insistent hum of Anders’s magic sliding up the sides of her calf, the dent in her shinbone, her knee.  For the first time it eases, just for a few seconds, and her eyes flutter shut before Fenris calls her name again.

Anders’s face has joined Fenris’s in her view. His mouth moves faster than she can track, but after a few repetitions she’s given to understand that both the bones in her leg have been crushed just below her knee. Most of the pieces are held in place by muscle and sinew, but one larger shard has been displaced by the sheer force of the trap and must be returned to its position before she can be healed. Field surgery will be necessary; if they wait until they return to the city she will not walk again without a heavy limp and a cane.

She laughs at that, a tight, breathless sound. “I know many fine people with limps.”

“Do they go traipsing up and down the Coast on a weekly basis?”

“They might.” She laughs again, dizzy. “I’m afraid.”

Anders grips her shoulder. Bits of his hair have fallen loose from the half-tail, framing his face in a rather softer look than his usual. “I’ll go as quick as I can.”

Her eyes flutter shut. Then Sebastian speaks, and for a moment she can’t find him before realizing he’s standing above her head, his bow out where he stands guard over their tiny clearing.  “Allow Fenris to do it.”

“To do what?”

“Put the bone back in place. Can’t you?”

He can, he thinks, though Anders dislikes the idea from the beginning and takes some convincing to even consider it. His voice rises and falls again, untempered by Sebastian’s more even tone; Fenris comes in and out like a low string, humming words she can’t make out through the rest. Eventually he bends close again, his voice rumbling pleasantly through her ears, and it takes some time to realize he’s asking her a question.

“What do you want, Hawke?”

She blinks, then gives a little roll of one shoulder. “Whatever…whatever Anders thinks is best.”

“Hawke.”

“I’m not,” she tries, her tongue entirely numb now from Anders’s herbs, her mind floating between rare points of land in an endless fog. “I’m in no…place to choose. Sorry.”

Another low conversation between Fenris and Anders, the latter increasingly exasperated, and then they come to some sort of agreement and Fenris slides away from Hawke’s head with only a brief touch to her cheek. Sebastian takes his place, his fingers around her shoulder not nearly as tender but just as comfortingly solid as she wraps both hands around his wrists.

Blue eyes. How very, very lovely they are under russet brows, even drawn down like this. “Sebastian.”

“Hawke.” He smiles, only a trifle tense, and the corners of his eyes crinkle. “How are you feeling?”

She grins. “ _Sebastian_. You have beautiful eyes.”

“You’re very kind.”

“Who could feel anything with that gaze trained on them? Like a weapon of its own.”

The corners of his mouth crook up, but before he can respond something― _tightens_ around her leg just below her knee, hard and growing harder with every second. Belatedly she remembers Anders warning her of restraint, or something like it, somewhere in the miasma of her memory, but that doesn’t help when it _hurts_ ―

Sebastian, to his credit, does not wince once at the violent clutch of her hands around his wrists. Nor does he balk when she arches under him, pinned by her thigh by people only trying to help her; or when the peculiar bite of Fenris’s power finds something deep in her leg, something _wrong_ , and there’s nothing she can do but throw her head back against the agony, a humiliating scream tearing out of the back of her throat.

The pain does not stop. She’s perversely relieved by that―at least they are not so weak as to be swayed by her frailty―and then Sebastian squeezes her hands, pulls her attention back to his face. “Hawke,” he says gently. “Would you like me to pray?”

“Yes,” she gasps, and he does, low at first, and steady, his brogue a comforting roll of sound and faith when she’s run dry.

She lets the Chant wash over her, and this time when the grey fog unrolls around the edges of her mind, she does not fight.

―

The next time she wakes, she’s warm.

They’re not at home, not yet―she can still feel the earth under her bedroll and smell the oddly thick air of Sundermount’s higher slopes. More, there’s a fire somewhere nearby, close enough she can feel the flickering heat of it, but when she tries to roll towards the warmth she is informed by a sharp warning pain up her right thigh to keep that idea tabled for the moment. She opens her eyes instead.

It’s night. A few stars gleam here and there through the heavy cloud-cover, but the moon is hidden and the only real light comes from the low-burning firepit. Anders is a huddled shape on a bedroll on the pit’s other side; Sebastian sits just beside him, cross-legged, his back to the fire and his eyes to the silent shale-choked mountain slopes before them. And Fenris…

“Hawke,” he says, quietly.

Fenris sits at her shoulder, his eyes very green in the firelight. His armor has been cleaned and set aside in a neat pile by his knee, her father’s staff laid just beyond it, and his thigh presses against her upper arm to keep it from the cool night air. His skin is very warm, even through the leather. She appreciates that more than usual at the moment.

“Fenris.”

He doesn’t ask her how she’s feeling. Instead he moves two fingers to the pulse in her throat―also deliciously warm―and then slides his fingers to cup her cheek. “What do you remember?”

“Enough.”

“You seemed…confused. For some time.”

“How diplomatic. I assure you, serah, I am entirely lucid at the moment.” And she is, to her own surprise, even if there’s a drug-laced lethargy through the rest of her that she suspects is the only thing keeping the pain at bay. It’s certainly too heavy to shift easily, and anyway, she’s too pleased to have Fenris’s hand on her to complain about anything in the world just now. “Where are we?”

“Far enough from the caves for safety. You were not fit to travel further.”

“Well. I do apologize for the inconvenience, though you certainly don’t need to sound so aggrieved about it.”

He smiles―her favorite smile, as it happens, the one that always seems to sneak up and surprise him―and when she turns her face into his hand he bends down, his eyes very gentle, and kisses her directly on the mouth. It’s brief enough to keep from hurting, and when he straightens the smile is still there. She hums in appreciation, which is in itself enough to win her another short kiss, and does her level best to match his smile. “Maker, it’s so good to see you.”

His smile grows broader, not quite a laugh. “And you, also.”

“Mm.” She tries and fails to lift a hand to his cheek, and realizes somewhat belatedly that whatever concoction Anders has put together to kill the pain has also put her very near drunk. “Your face is very far away. Did you know?”

There’s a soft snort of a laugh across the fire, and Hawke manages to roll her head far enough to see Sebastian glancing over his shoulder with a smile. His eyes are also very nice, bright with humor. “Welcome back, Hawke,” he says quietly, then pushes to his feet. “I think I’ll check the path once more. Call if you have need of me.”

“I’ll always need you,” she objects, half-serious, and then Fenris curls his very warm hand around her cheek again and her protests fly immediately from her head. “Well. Whatever you like, I suppose.”

Sebastian laughs again with a trace of a bow, and then he’s gone, his white armor disappearing into the shadow of the path.

Hawke blinks for a moment, struggling to reorient herself; when she finds Fenris’s face once more, watching her with a sort of pleased bemusement, and she can’t help but give a ridiculous little sigh she’ll utterly deny once she has better control over her expressions. “Your _face_ , Fenris.”

“What of it?”

“I can’t reach it.”

He does laugh now, just for a moment, and leans towards her until she can kiss the corner of his mouth. “Are you in pain?”

“Not in the slightest.” Not at the moment, anyway, though she can feel it lurking dangerously around the edges of her knee. “What about you?”

“None at all. You were the only casualty.”

“Casualty of _love_ ,” she offers, and snickers at the glancing expression over Fenris’s face. “Do you know, I think I could die happy here right now?”

“Please don’t,” he says, his voice very dry, though his hand tenses just for a moment on her cheek. “Not from something like this trap.”

Right. The trap. The whole reason she’s laid out as she is, the whole reason her leg keeps threatening to revolt against the rest of her. How odd, that she could have almost forgotten. “Fenris. How’s my leg?”

Now his eyes go tight, the green flicking down and back again. “It was serious. It still is.”

“You are always such a twinkling ray of sunshine.” She makes a game effort to wiggle her toes, gasps at the little flare of agony rocketing upwards, and rolls her eyes at Fenris’s motion of concern. “Don’t fret over something my own fault. Just tell me what the damage is.”

His mouth thins, but he inclines his head and tells her. Both bones in her leg are broken. Fenris had managed to reset the bone with Anders’s guidance, and Anders had spent the next two hours expending every magical store he had to put the leg right again. Even now it is barely half-healed, swathed in bandages and splinted past immobility, and Sebastian will go the following day for a cart to bear her back to Kirkwall.

“A cart,” Hawke echoes, an irrepressible giggle bubbling out of her. “How undignified.”

“Of course. You are known for your dignity.”

“You horrible elf,” she says, delighted. “It must be all right if you’re being sarcastic.”

He smiles again, real even through the tension, and for a moment she just lets herself― _look_ at him. Such a handsome face, really, strong-jawed and proud-nosed and with such marvelous black eyebrows, his green eyes soft even above the cruelty of the lyrium. She’s so very _fond_ of this face.

“Hawke,” says Fenris, his voice very quiet, and his fingers slide fully into her hair. “I did not enjoy seeing you in such…discomfort.”

“Well, thank the Maker for that. I’d have been concerned if you did.”

“ _Hawke_.”

“Oh, Fenris,” she sighs, and manages on the third attempt to cover his hand with her own. “Just admit you had a scare and want to cuddle. It’s all right. I won’t hold it against you, I promise.”

She can’t even find words for the noise he makes. Something between a choked laugh and a cough and a sort of terrible desperation; after a moment it happens again, his turned face and closed fist over his mouth doing little to stifle the sound. The third time Anders gives a rough breath on the other side of the firepit and rolls to his other side, away from them both.

She could tease him for that. Instead―she only watches, her heart painfully full, as he runs a hand through his hair and then, without quite meeting her eyes, shifts to lie alongside her on the bedroll. He’s more than careful of her leg, pressing against her only from the waist up, and he props his head on one palm when she leans as best she can against his chest. His other hand comes gently across her stomach and up over her ribs before curling around her side.

It’s about the most affectionate he’s been in mixed company since the week of their reunion. She’d be giddy if Anders’s mix hadn’t already done it for her.

As it is, she’s more than willing to bask in his undivided attention, which she makes clear by gazing as adoringly at him as possible. “Why does everyone I know have such pretty eyes?”

Fenris rolls said eyes with a great deal of exaggeration, though he’s kind enough to return them to her afterwards with a marked gentleness. “Can you not be still even now?”

“I might be persuaded, with the right…motivation.”

Fenris shakes his head, then bends close enough his lips brush over her cheek, close enough she can feel the heat of him across her shoulder. “Rest, Hawke,” he murmurs. “Because I ask.”

“Well.” _Well_ , if he puts it like that, she supposes she is more tired than she realized. And he is exceedingly comfortable and _terribly_ warm, and apparently inclined to indulge her most prurient desires for cuddling despite her inability to move. It might be worse. “I suppose that’s rather good motive, when you put it like that.”

He sighs even as his hand tightens on her side, and for a moment she feels his eyelashes flutter against her cheek. “Go to sleep. I will be here when you wake.”

She presses her lips to his jaw, the only part of him she can reach. “Promise?”

“I promise,” he murmurs, and that’s enough for her to lean against his chest and let out a long, deep breath.

She doesn’t know how long it takes. Only a few minutes, she thinks, lulled by Fenris’s heartbeat and the distant whistle of wind over the mountain, by the comforting sight of Sebastian returning quietly from the far path with bow in hand and peace in his face. Even Anders’s soft snoring has become a cosy reminder of everything that waits for them in Kirkwall. For _her_ , trap and broken leg and potion-induced giddiness and all.

Well. As soon as she gets a cart anyway, she thinks, and goes to sleep.


	44. reply, from the stones of a sea wall (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris ****  
Rating: K+ ****  
Word Count: 2600  
**Notes:** A companion piece to [love letter to a striking match](http://archiveofourown.org/works/743244/chapters/10690175). for an anon who said that piece explained why fenris loved hawke, but who wanted to know why hawke loved fenris in return.

 **Soundtrack:** [I Could Hear the Water at the Edge of All Things](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnMKch3S1J8), by Hammock.

—

reply, from the stones of a sea wall

—

It’s hard to hold back the sea.

The lesson comes quicker than most. All her life she’s watched her father work, laughing, stone after stone passing through his hands. Every day the wall he builds to hold back the world grows a little higher, a little broader, the wind and waves a little lesser for its building. It is strong, grey stone and white mortar so steady before the sea; it is _good_ , and what else is her father but unfailing? He is her _father._ Nothing he touches can fall.

Oh, but _he_ ―

She’s watching the day he dies.

There is no storm. No warning, aside from the sudden upswell of salt and silt carried to her nose by the breeze. He has begun to teach her how to build, how to shelter from the sea; he has moved slower these last years so that she can follow, and she had not understood he had been raising stones around her, too. The water swells abruptly and he stumbles; she turns from the wall’s higher edge, aghast, in time to see him stumble again, and fall, his skin so slick and wet her fingers only slide away with every gasp.

She cannot hold him. Only a bright, brief instant of his eyes on hers, the sudden proud lift of his head; and then the white, cold wave crashes over him and swallows him. Spray breaks against the wall to ice her face, and when the wave recedes again, her father is gone.

So Malcolm dies, his daughter watching, and when the funeral is done and their friends have come and grieved and gone away, Hawke picks up the chisel and begins to build again.

―

The first year after that is harder than anything she’s ever done. Her mother’s lost to grief, the twins just― _lost―_ and when Lothering becomes the leading edge of a living Blight they have little choice but to run. They leave her father’s ashes where the fever burned him alive, abandoned to be burned again by darkspawn, along with the house her father built and everything else they’ve loved for the last seven years.

She can feel the walls cracking as they run. She’s never been much of a builder―she burns much better―but she’s _tried_ , and she tries now, and just for a moment when they crest the hill she dares to think that maybe this has been enough after all, maybe, maybe―

Bethany dies like lightning strikes the sea. One moment she is there, shining and strong―

Then she is gone, and the world is blacker than it was before, and the agony rolls like thunder through their bones.

―

Kirkwall breaks over them in brine, a thick and icy swell that never warms. Gamlen has no welcome for them, no home like the home that burned behind them; he gives them a roof instead, and bitter neighbors, and a year of servitude to buy these things and keep them for their own.

Hawke does not grieve. Instead she picks up her father’s staff and picks up her father’s stones, and with every man she kills for Meeran she builds the wall around her family a little higher, a little stronger, filling in the torn and gaping places where her father and her sister were torn away. She does not grieve; she lines the rock with mortar instead, her blood shed now to pay the price of the blood the ocean has taken. A small cost, when her mother and her brother still live. When she still has something left to guard.

Day by day, stone by stone, tide after unending tide, her wall holds back the sea.

She does not grieve.

―

Here is what the sea takes: the last-gasped edge of sunlight over a glancing wave, the cry of a solitary gull, a life never offered for the taking.

―

Aveline is the first. An easy addition, this woman who knows what it means to protect, who knows what it means to have someone stolen all the same. Then Varric comes, glib dwarf with a glib tongue and a dangerous promise of an offer. He only needs her help, just this once; a small job, a small favor, a little more blood and stone to make her family that much safer. How can she say no?

Besides, she _likes_ Varric. Likes Aveline too, and Merrill when she comes, and Anders when she finds him in the refuse of the city, gleaming with magic and purpose. She can guard them too, she’s sure of it. The shore is broad enough, certainly, an endless stretch of glinting sand; she need only work a little faster to raise the walls against the sea, made stronger by the storms, that still rises every day to rush against the stones she has laid to keep it back. It breathes in her ear, steady as the stars, a living thing to remind her there will never be an end, that this sea has existed always and will continue beyond the memories of time.

She doesn’t care. She’s strong enough. She _will_ be strong enough.

―

(Isabela will not have her. Impossible to keep a woman born in the waves from its waters; she can no more be taken than air can be taken by air, or a wing torn from a tern without killing it. She walks into the tides and comes back again, unharmed, the sooty tangles of her hair longer, or shorter, the smile on her face still as bright as a blade turned under a wave. No walls can hold bones like the bones of a shark, laughter graceful as a moray, eyes like the copper coins gleaming in the wreckage of some treasure-ship, forgotten long ago.)

(And Fenris―)

―

She meets Fenris on a cold night in the alienage, and though he takes her aid he will not take her protection, not yet, not easily. How is she to guard a man with her walls who has spent three years fleeing the ones behind him? Her heart cannot bear to cage him; his heart has built its own cage instead, brambles made of hate and fear tightly twined through the longing for _more_ he cannot kill. She cannot free him of that herself―her hands are not made for such fine work―but sometimes she finds it enough to sit with him in his home, or in hers, as he works on the unknotting, and when he asks if he should go this way or that way, to give her answers as best she can.

The first time he laughs, every defense she has crumbles at once.

―

Over time the wall grows, brick by brick and stone by stone, and her arms must spread a little wider. So it must be to guard her dwarf, a pair of elves, an apostate made home for a spirit, a woman with a dead husband and a shield made wall in itself. Gamlen stays too, grudging acceptance as it is, and her mother, and Carver―

The Deep Roads tear Carver from her in a matter of days. He is fine, he is healthy, he is just as much her little brother as the warrior he wants to be―and then the sea finds the fissure she forgot, the little crack between two stones, and just as quickly as her father, as her sister, he is gone in the roaring rush. The Wardens are a wall even she cannot breach with all her stubborn will, and months pass before she learns he has at least been brought to the safety of someone else’s guarding. Not _hers,_ though, and how can she be sure, how can she _know_ that he is safe if she is not _there_ ―

Well. She has never been able to protect her family, after all. Perhaps this way he will live a little longer.

―

For a long time, she thinks this might be―enough. She has lost her father; she has lost Bethany; she has lost Carver; but Gamlen lives, and every one of her friends, and even if the lives they choose take them occasionally to the places where the shore gives way to grey saltwater, they never go so far they can’t be dragged back again, gasping, grinning a little wilder for the touch of the sea.

There are other nights, too, warm and lamplit in the dry safety of Varric’s rooms, every one of them gathered around his table, cards spread in hands and laughter reminding her there are places that are not lost to wind and waves and the break in a stone wall. Other nights, where she lets her head loll on Aveline’s shoulder as she tells stories of how she learned to use a sword; where she stands beside Anders in his clinic, magic in his hands and hers, a woman’s tearful gratitude in their ears as she walks away with both her children still living.

Other nights, with Fenris’s warmth pressed against her shoulder to elbow as they sound out the shape of his world, word by word, letter by letter, step by step.

―

He gives her one night. It’s more than she expected and she’s far too eager for fear, for the caution that another’s heart died in his ungentle hands not so long ago. She takes what he offers and gives him what she can in answer, and she doesn’t realize until it’s over that her fingers have begun to bleed. Even after all this time his heart is still too wrapped in thorns, the brambles of his fear too tight and too _there_ ; he goes, wounded, and there is nothing for her to do but begin the wall again.

So be it. She’s used to stone by now, and if nothing else, water always washes out the blood.

―

Still, he stays, and if from time to time he lets himself stand in the shadow of the wall she’s been building for ten years, she doesn’t mention it. It’s enough he’s there, and enough he’ll occasionally smile when she teases him, and for many months, she’s satisfied that at least their friendship has survived. She has him here; she has Aveline and Merrill and Anders and everyone as close as they can bear to be held, and if this is what she can do, if this, if this can be _enough_ ―

The sea swallows her mother in one violent froth of salt and spume. Nothing is left but the suggestion of a step in the sand and a voice on the wind― _so proud of you_ ―and then the sea takes that too, washed away into grey sand and slate-dark sky.

Why fight it after that? No matter the pressure the wall has always crumbled; no matter how she spreads her arms she cannot reach wide enough to keep them all. Better, perhaps, to take a breath, to lift the weight from her palms and be washed away with the rest of them. At least then she would not have to see the empty places where her failures have cost them their lives. What good has she ever done for any of them?

She wonders this a long time, the fire in her room unlit, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes fixed ahead, into nothing. She has never saved them. She has never been strong enough. _Why_?

―

(A startling thing, then, one day to hear the chink of hammer and chisel at her back, to turn and find Fenris there, one eyebrow lifted, one hand outstretched towards her where she stands knee-deep in the flood tide. To find his fingers gentle on hers as he pulls her back towards him, towards the things she has built and the people she has even now to protect, a smile on his face as if to say: _there is life here yet, Hawke_.

More startling to find there are sections in the wall repaired, that there is new growth on the ends she did not build herself, that there is Anders’s touch here, and Aveline’s there, and Merrill’s mark on the low places where the roots were not strong before. She turns―and there are palms alongside hers, bracing, ready, Fenris’s back sharing the spread of the weight.

She is not alone. She had forgotten.

She does not forget again.)

―

The years pass, and she learns. The Qunari blow through the city like a hurricane; Isabela goes and returns and goes again, a cockle shell on the leading edge of a tsunami, and when it is over and they drag themselves ashore again, bruised and battered and _alive_ , it’s with the shadow of her wall still there, a little beaten but a little stronger, strong enough to hold back the storm, just this once.

She learns. She _grows_ , stone by stone, and lifts her face into the clean winds that blow in from the sea. She was afraid, once.

She is not afraid now.

―

Neither does she fear when Fenris’s face changes like an ocean’s dawn, when his master rises and opens his hand for his return. He had showed her, once, that she was not alone; he is not either, and if what they have built between them can withstand the strength of the Arishok and all his forces, she does not doubt it will hold against the weight of one man who knows nothing of what it means to protect, who knows _nothing_ of the will of the sea.

―

Here is what the sea takes: the fear when a man leaves his master for the last time; a ship from a savage shore.

―

There’s nothing left to do, then, but to let Fenris take her brittle defenses against him in his hands and tear them down once more. They’d never been strong anyway, and he’s had too many years dismantling his own heart’s cage to falter now with hers. It hurts to watch them fall, if only because she knows the cost of them to build, but there’s something in the sight of the stones crumbling to the sand and the world opening up again on the other side, more beautiful than she’d remembered―

Fenris kisses her, his hands warm on her cheek and the small of her back, his fear gone with the thorns that have snared him for so long. Ten years to unwind them, unbind him from the brambles; ten years for her to understand that not all cages are safe and not all walls must stand forever.

Some should. The ones she has built to guard her family, her friends who are her family; she will build and rebuild those as many times as she must, because the sea is endless and waits endlessly, but it will not take them from her one single moment before they stand at the shore and tell the horizon they are ready. The stones are too familiar to her now; she has worked the mortar too long to let it go.

But the rest―

Fenris takes her hand, and when he turns she lets herself follow him through the gap in the sea wall that had not been there before, the stones’ edges crumbling a little under her touch. The shore spreads wide and white before her, sand glinting where their steps have displaced it, surf skating over their edges in white froth and green-glass gleaming to smooth it whole again, and over it all the steady ebb and rise of the salt waves rushing, rushing. Ten years since her father died, and only now has she realized how much the sea gives, too.

―

The rest, she thinks, she might be willing to set free.


	45. Minific Meme, pt. 1 (Hawke/Fenris)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The following few chapters are from a minific prompt meme I did on tumblr some time ago. Enjoy!

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 600  
**Prompt:** _G: a fistfight _,__  from kindervenom.

—

It occurs to Hawke, in retrospect, that informing the man his face resembles the backside of a queasy bull might not have been the most tactful way she’s ever dissuaded a handsy drunk.

Unfortunately, the thought occurs to her right about the moment his meaty fist is flying directly towards her left temple. 

She’s not exactly built for melee, but she knows the Hanged Man far too well by now, and she flings herself to the side just enough that his knuckles smash into the solid drink-stained bar instead. The man howls and staggers back, clutching his fist; Hawke slithers off the stool and ducks around him, doing her level best to ignore the sight of the Hanged Man pitching wildly under her feet. Damn Isabela and her drinking games— _damn_ Isabela for wandering off with that smiling woman from the apothecary’s— _damn_ her own careless _mouth—_

The man shakes out his hand, scowling, and swivels on his heel until he finds Hawke again. She’s vaguely jealous of his lingering coordination, aware also that the rest of the Hanged Man’s illustrious patrons have cleared a loose ring around them and more than one shouting onlooker has begun to place bets.   
She pulls a face, stumbles another few steps backwards, and tries to catch her breath. The man across has begun rolling his shoulders backwards, cracking his neck, and when she gives him her best look of bewildered innocence he only strips off his vest and spits. 

“Nasty habit,” she offers weakly, and is disappointed when the patrons behind her refuse to allow her exit from the makeshift ring. Then she catches a glimpse of white hair in the crowd, and a flash of a gold earring; and there stand both Fenris and Varric, their arms crossed under identical looks of speculation and not _nearly_ enough concern for her taste.

Hawke purses her lips and gives Fenris a very hard, very specific look. _Get. Me. Out. Of. This._

He arches an eyebrow. _I warned you to learn how to control your tongue._

She gestures furiously at her very tall, very annoyed, very _muscled_ opponent, who has succumbed to both his liquor and the crowd’s encouragement and now stripped out of his shirt as well. A large tattoo of five angry skulls spreads over his back, doing very little to alleviate any part of Hawke’s trepidation. _He is going to kill me. Literally. Kill me dead right here and now._

A very, very small shake of his head. _Not that far_.

She narrows her eyes as viciously as she can. _I am warning you right now, Fenris: if I end this fight spread across the baseboards here in a disgusting, liquor-soaked, pulpy paste of an ex-Champion, I will happily and gleefully forgo every moment of the company of the Maker’s side I have allotted to me in order to haunt the absolute entirety of your remaining miserable, lonely, unbelievably unhelpful life._

His brow furrows. _What?_

Hawke groans amid the raucous cheering, and that’s when the drunken colossus across from her ducks his head and charges.

(She does scrape out a win in the end, thanks to her own panicked reflexes and a surprisingly solid support beam, but that victory’s not worth half the satisfaction she feels ignoring Fenris for the rest of the night.)

(At least, until he gives her half his winnings. She’s a practical woman, after all, and if he even unbends enough to kiss her cheek as he hands over the coin, well—to the victor go the spoils.)

—

 

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 900  
**Prompt:** S, _Music [send a song or a lyric]_ : "you can wear the crown but you're no princess," from knight-of-tuxedo. The lyric is from Death Valley by Fall Out Boy.

—

The Champion of Kirkwall is never what they expect. She’s not tall enough, not strong enough, too scarred, too loud, too prone to quips and casual touch for any well-bred party to easily invite without concern. They do anyway, of course, the snub outweighing the risk, and if nothing else she’s good for conversation fodder in the off-season.

All the same, Trevelyan’s not ashamed to admit she’s worried. The Inquisition needs Hawke and her Warden contacts, not to mention her expertise with the monster they’re fighting, and there’s not really another option; but at the same time she’s heard the stories of the refugee and her questionable table manners, her penchant for insulting powerful people with no thought to the repercussions. The last city leader to challenge her had ended up dead, after all. 

But. But Corypheus looms, and the Inquisition needs Hawke, and Trevelyan has little choice. It’s with no small trepidation she goes to the battlements with a dinner invitation in one hand and the mark faintly burning in the other, just in case they end up desperate for conversation. It’s not needed, however; against all odds Hawke appears to be a perfectly human Champion, no tinges of demonic power or unhinged ambition leaking out even once, and despite herself Trevelyan finds she’s rather looking forward to dinner.

She installs Josephine to the Champion’s immediate right all the same, just in case a little diplomacy is needed to smooth over a gaffe or two. It’s not that she distrusts Hawke; it’s just that she’s known all her life the way these conversations can turn at the drop of a feathered Orlesian hat, and she’d prefer not to alienate the scraps of their support because a duke with an over-inflated ego can’t recognize sarcasm when he sees it. Hawke is a Fereldan refugee, she knows that much, and while she doesn’t doubt the woman’s capability in combat, she’s not certain how often farmers teach their daughters the intricacy of Nevarran royal hierarchy, or which way a painted fan can be turned during a conversation to give the most offense.

It takes all of two courses to see she’s woefully underestimated the Champion of Kirkwall.

The woman is—and Trevelyan even hates to think the word, reminded too strongly of overbearing aunts in her childhood— _charming_ , and more than able to hold her own against Lord Forsythe’s casual disdain, and she even restrains herself to civil deflection at the most impertinent questions of her time in Kirkwall. Every now and then her eyes catch Trevelyan’s across the table, the faint irony in her gaze enough to make Trevelyan blush at her own expectations, and by the end of the meal she’s appalled to discover Lord Forsythe bending his head over Hawke’s hand with more warmth than she’s seen from him in weeks. 

“If the Champion supports the Inquisition, we can do no less,” he says just as Trevelyan approaches, his mustached smile unfortunately handsome, and Trevelyan holds her tongue long enough for him to withdraw before requesting Hawke’s company. 

She accepts, as somehow Trevelyan had not expected, and by the time they’ve wandered to the base of Skyhold’s formidable walls she’s mustered the strength to apologize. “I didn’t intend for you to become a recruiting officer when I invited you. I’m sorry if Forsythe’s attentions were unwelcome.”

Hawke waves a hand, turning them both towards the stairs that climb the battlements. “He’s harmless. A fop, but harmless. Besides, I don’t mind helping the Inquisition if I can. It’s my trouble you’re hunting as it is.”

“Varric did say you were prone to taking too much guilt upon yourself.”

“Varric talks too much,” Hawke says, grinning, and then they reach the top of the battlements and a cool, crisp wind soars over the stone, bringing the smell of snow and smoke with it.

Hawke falls silent, and when Trevelyan stops she turns to lean both hands on the wall, staring out over the mountains spread below them like so many crests of endless waves, plucked into being by the Maker’s hand and cloaked in snow. The sun has already dipped below the horizon, glazing the peaks in a narrow range of purples and twilight blues, and in the distance the first stars have begun to gleam through the wisping clouds.

“I wish he could see this,” Hawke says abruptly.

Nothing more. Trevelyan takes a step nearer, one hand hovering over the Champion’s shoulder before falling uselessly to her side. The wind picks up again, rippling through the fur Hawke wears over her shoulders, flicking Trevelyan’s hair from her forehead and back again. 

She does not think Hawke’s eyes are wet from the smoke.

Besides, it isn’t Varric she means, and Trevelyan’s shocked at how much her heart aches for this woman she barely knows, this Champion from a city she’s never visited, a farmer’s daughter with Amell blood and too many scars, who’s got blood on her hands and death behind her and a smile that comes too easily. How stupid, not to realize she’s nothing more than a tired woman in love after all.

“Hawke,” she says instead, only that, and leans with her on the battlements, her face turned into the wind over snow, thinking of the ones they’ve left behind.

—

 

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 480  
**Prompt:** _K. On the edge of consciousness,_ from lollard.

—

Fenris closes his eyes. And opens them again, and closes them, and does his best to take one true breath through the agony splitting his chest. There’s a touch on his shoulder and then his neck, and someone’s mouth has moved very close to his ear.

“Fenris.”

He knows that voice. He likes that voice, likes the sound of his name in it even better. Something dredges up a name from the depths of his memory, though the word is difficult to speak. “Hawke.”

A faint, fond laugh. He feels himself relax at the sound of it. “Be still, lover. That maul got you square in the chest and I need to make sure you’re not dying.”

He hums agreement, furrows his brow at the pain lancing up his throat at the effort. He tries another breath, experimental and tentative, and groans when the sharp hurt spreads to his shoulders and further, echoes shocking down his arms. 

“I told you to hold still,” Hawke says, very close to him, and then he feels his breastplate lift away and cool hands spread over his chest. Then—the telltale hum of magic through his skin, and deeper into his bones. He tenses, defensive reflex; a moment later he recognizes the taste of it, the feel of _Hawke_ in his skin, and all at once the burring tension fades into nothing. Hawke will not hurt him. Hawke’s magic will not hurt him.

“Just cracked,” Hawke says above him. “Nothing badly broken. Good.”

“Good,” he echoes, feeling her fingers ghost down towards his stomach and back again towards his chest, trailing magic behind them. He does not wish to smile; all the same it feels impossible to suppress, and as the magic fades away Hawke’s mouth presses gently, upside-down, to his own.

“Hawke,” he says again, as much to remind himself as to feel the name in his mouth.

“Still here,” she says quietly, and somehow he manages to drag his eyes open enough to see her. There’s a faint glow of magic below his chin, throwing blue light oddly across her face above him, but even so he can recognize the smile slowly spreading over her face. “Welcome back, my dear.”

He breathes in, feels the ache of new healing spread through his chest, already only a fraction of the hurt before. The sense of _Hawke_ in his skin is faintly overpowering and comforting at the same time, but as her fingers dance over his chest and up to his chin, he finds himself not caring in the slightest.

“I was struck,” he says, startled.

“Rather abruptly,” she tells him, her voice dry. “Regardless, I think you’ll live.”

“A relief,” he says, and closes his eyes again to the low murmur of Hawke’s voice and the ripple of her magic through his skin. 

No safer place for him, after all.


	46. Minific Meme, pt. 2 (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 700  
**Prompt:** _V: an abandoned place,_  from whatthefawxblogs.

—

“My, my, my,” Hawke says, her arms wrapping around his waist from behind, “what have we here?”

“ _You_ brought me here, Hawke,” Fenris points out, just in case she has forgotten, and determinedly does not allow himself to be affected by the way her chin drapes over his shoulder. They have been on the road through the Free Marches for weeks since Kirkwall’s chantry exploded; they do not have time now for Hawke’s vagaries of mood. “You said you had something to show me.” 

“This is it.”

“This?” He blinks, looks up; a ruined chantry in the dead of night, long abandoned by its worshipers, altar and pews alike dusted with a fine coat of neglect in the moonlight. Green ivy has begun to grow over Andraste’s gold idol; a piece of the far roof has caved in, stars glinting pale and clear through the rubble. “A ruin, Hawke. Hardly worth the stop.”

“You’re not looking with your imagination,” Hawke murmurs, laughing, and nips at his ear. “Be _imaginative_ , Fenris.”

He purses his lips, turns his head enough towards her that she can catch his mouth in a kiss, her teeth dragging teasingly over his bottom lip. Even now it’s enough to spark heat low in his gut; he wraps an arm around her waist, pulling her closer against him, and sighs when she eventually pulls her mouth away. “What do you want, Hawke?” he says again, low and rougher than he means it, and a slow, dangerous smile spreads over her face.

“I love you so very much,” she murmurs, stroking one thumb over his cheek. “I do hope you know that.”

“Yes,” he says, because he does, and he allows her when she moves to lead him down the aisle towards the altar, pew after silent pew passing on either side, the white marble-carved statues of Hessarian and Brona and Cathaire peaceful observers of every step. Her hand tightens around his own as they reach Andraste, the ivy wrapped to her waist and higher as if in longing, and Hawke turns to face him with her eyes gleaming. 

“I love you,” she says again, and shrugs. “I probably will for the rest of my life. Which, for the record, I intend to spend with you. I hope that’s all right.”

Her eyes are so bright in the moonlight. Fenris takes a step closer, following the tug of her hand in the silence of this forgotten chantry, no witness but the stars and the saints and Andraste, dressed in the green growth of new ivy. 

“Hawke,” he says, and sees her shudder at her own name. “I am yours.”

She lifts her chin; he kisses her, gently, and again, and again, and again. “As long as there is life in me,” he murmurs against her mouth, “I will go with you. Do not doubt that.” 

“Damn you,” she says, the first tears tracing down her cheeks, and when she pulls him back with her against the plinth Andraste stands upon he doesn’t hesitate to follow. Her fingers slide under his shirt; he finds her belt and looses it, caught up in the quiet rush of her touch, the abrupt loosening of all weight, no worry, no fear. 

They do not move again until the moonlight has given way to the early blush of new dawn, the stars at last begun to fade, the ivy that wraps the statue’s base fading from green to a new, pale gold. Even the white-stone statues that line the walls seem warmer than before, tinged with the light of a new day.

Hawke kisses him as they dress again, her hands so warm even now, her smile sparking his own in reluctant answer, a constant even after so many years. She smiles again, her hand folding into his, and he pauses only once at the door of the ruined building to look back into the hallowed, silent peace. 

“Thank you,” he says gravely, “for the loan of your chantry.”

He’s not sure, but he thinks Andraste smiles.

—

 

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 600  
**Prompt:** _T. An obscure AU: Galaxy Quest,_  from perahn.

—

Nothing in his career has prepared him for this. 

For a moment he can’t even breathe, arrested by the sight of stars unfolding before the window in an endless roll, the curve of the Earth blue and white and so very small in the distant black, and in the bay below them, the clean lines so familiar he sees them in his sleep, the stylized wings along the nacelles as stark and red as he remembers—

“The _D.A.S._ _Dragon_ ,” Hawke says behind him, glee in every word, “is ready to fly.”

—

As soon as Isabela’s managed to steer them out of the dock and Merrill’s terrifyingly enthusiastic Dalish have taken the rest of the crew for the tour of a ship he still can’t quite believe is _real_ , Fenris pulls Hawke to the nearest empty hallway. 

“You cannot _possibly_ be serious,” he hisses.

She pulls her arm away, gestures to the window that lines the hallway, some distant planet he doesn’t know sliding green and gold beside them. “Serious? Fenris, this is the most serious I’ve ever been in my life. Look at this!”

It is beautiful. It is also beside the point. “Hawke, they want us to negotiate at a table of war. There’s no script for this.”

Hawke flaps a hand, the bars of her nonexistent rank glinting at her collar. Fenris wants to tear the damn things off and throw them out the nearest airlock, along with his false ears and Anders’s prop staff with the blue LEDs that make the Dalish flinch every time he hits the switch. “It’s just _talking_ , Fenris. I’ve always been good at that. Come on, remember Naples?”

He does remember Naples. That had been the early years of the show, when he’d still thought there was more to his character than the weaponsmaster defeated by an enemy the writers wanted to make a better threat. When he’d let himself believe the tension between his character and Hawke’s had meant something off the stage, too. 

She’d kissed him, in Naples. They’d had one night, and he’d realized immediately there could be nothing else if the show was to continue. Still, they’d been up to the first hours of the morning, just talking, and he hadn’t…regretted. Not that. “Naples was a long time ago.”

“And this is _now_.” Hawke steps forward, that same impossible smile on her face, her eyes bright and shining with stars. “Look at where we are. Look at what we can do. Fenris, this is the adventure of our _lives_. We can’t miss it because we’re afraid.”

His hand lifts despite himself, wraps around the red sleeve of her commander’s uniform. Cotton and polyester and so mundane for where they are, and somehow the familiar texture is a comfort even through the prosthetic tattoos lining his fingers. Two hours in makeup this morning for the con, the same as it’s been every working morning for ten years, ever since he’d left Shakespeare and Marlowe for a soundstage in California with terrible air conditioning and a roof that leaked when it rained.

“Hawke,” he says, his voice low, “be careful.”

“I’m always careful,” she says, grinning, and then her head ducks another inch towards him, and some bone-deep reflex has him leaning his own in answer. How many years—

“Oh!” Merrill says brightly. “Here you are!”

Fenris jerks his face to the window as Hawke turns to answer the cheerful elfin woman. Idiot, to let starlight and an impossible ship weaken him so quickly. Six years of resolve, six years of watching Hawke date her way through the rest of the crew, a number of fans, and a short fling with the showrunner himself; six years of steadfastly ignoring the looks after every private scene between their characters. They’d never even kissed on the show.

An adventure. Nothing more.

—

 

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** K  
**Word Count:** 800  
**Prompt:** _C. A moment’s respite,_ from rannadylin. 

—

“That man,” says Corda, collapsing with a gusty sigh next to her on the log, “is the most difficult, unpleasant—“

“I _told_ you—”

“—uncivil—“

“I said from the beginning you were wasting your time—“

“—handsome—“

“I _said_ —what?”

“—unfriendly elf I have ever had the displeasure of meeting.”

Charlotte purses her lips around another bite of the tired, overcooked vegetables the camp cook has prepared for tonight’s supper. They’re not that big a party, out here only for reconnaissance on the templars afflicted by red lyrium, but the elf accompanying their Inquisitor might be utterly alone for how much attention he pays anyone but Lady Trevelyan. “Didn’t you say you liked a challenge?”

“Lottie,” Corda whines, drawing out the last syllable. “He told me he wasn’t interested in conversation!”

Charlotte laughs, and when her twin nudges her in the shoulder she nudges her back. “Just because you’ve finally found someone willing to be honest with you doesn’t mean you should give up.”

Corda gives a long groan and stretches out her feet before the log. Her boots are crusted with mud and silt, testament to the rough pace Fenris had set for his small team over the hill today, and her shortbow has stains spattered by the handgrip Charlotte can’t quite identify. 

“I think,” Corda says at last, her eyes closed and her face turned up to the night sky, “I’ll braid my hair tomorrow.”

“Well, you’re not the only one with news. If you can stand to hear me talk about someone that isn’t you, anyway.”

“Don’t tease, Lottie. I’m too tired.”

“The Champion of Kirkwall’s supposed to come to the camp tonight.”

Corda jerks upright, knocks Charlotte’s sheathed sword from the log, and nearly upends the boiled vegetables into the dirt. “You’re lying.”

“Never so. Inquisitor got a raven this afternoon.”

“ _Really_.” A faraway look enters Corda’s eyes, always the more romantic of the two of them. “Do you think she’s like the stories?”

“They never are, are they?”

“She might be. She might be willing to talk about it. Maybe she’ll let us ask.”

“You are too caught up in dragons,” Charlotte says severely, and that’s when the hoofbeats sound through the trees at the bottom of the hill. A few minutes later, they ride into the camp together, the Champion ahead on a black gelding, Varric and Cassandra behind on their own horses with heavier packs lashed behind their saddles. 

“Ta-da!” the Champion sings out, her laugh carrying through the camp, and as Senick takes her horse’s head, she dismounts with a good deal too much energy for someone who’s been tramping through the Emerald Graves all afternoon. “I told you we’d find it eventually.”

“Only because I had a map,” Cassandra says, dismounting herself, but she’s smiling as the Inquisitor comes to greet them. They chat for a few minutes, too low for Charlotte to make out at this distance, and then Cassandra and Varric peel away to head towards the campfire and dinner, and the Inquisitor turns with Hawke towards the camp table spread with maps and documents. 

“Lady Trevelyan’s taller than she is,” Corda observes at last.

“You sound disappointed.”

Corda hums, toying with the end of her ponytail, and Charlotte’s just about to return to her vegetables when her sister stiffens. “Ooh,” she hums. “This should be interesting.”

Charlotte follows her eyes across the camp just in time to see the elf emerge from his tent. His shoulders are high and tense, his jaw set, and he doesn’t hesitate as he goes directly to meet the Inquisitor and the Champion. He says something to them both, his voice too low to hear, and then the Champion leans forward with a wink and flicks something from his shoulder. 

“ _Well_ ,” says Corda, but the rest is lost in an embarrassed little gasp as Fenris catches Hawke’s wrist and pulls her directly into a kiss. It’s neither prolonged nor improper in any way, but it’s _certainly_ familiar to the both of them, and by the time they part Fenris has a smile on his face warm enough to make him look wholly different in the firelight. 

“I think,” Charlotte says into her sister’s silence, “that might be why he was putting you off.”

“Not _one_ time does he mention he’s taken,” Corda says at last, letting out an aggrieved sigh as she leans back on her hands on the log. “Well, she’s rather fetching too, now that I think of it.”

“Corda.”

“She’ll be staying for a few days, won’t she?”

“ _Corda_.” 

Her sister laughs, and across the firelit camp Fenris and Hawke walk beside the Inquisitor to the broad camp table, smiling, hand in hand.


	47. Minific Meme, pt. 3 (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** K  
 **Word Count:** 1000  
 **Prompt:** _T. An obscure AU: the Hunger Games,_ from anonymous.

—

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

She expects the quick turn, the heft of the machete; she _doesn’t_ expect the handaxe to smack into the branch six inches left of her cheek to set the leaves trembling furiously. Hawke grips the trunk a little tighter, her heart pounding hard in her throat, and raises her voice. “Just a bit of friendly advice, you know.”

The man below her draws further back into the cover of his chosen tree, his sharp eyes scanning through the foliage for her hiding place. When he finds her his eyes narrow—very green, greener than the woods—and he reaches into the pack beside him. 

“ _Another_ axe?” Hawke blurts as the steel emerges, and scrambles up a few branches further, hopefully out of his reach. “How long were you at the Cornucopia?”

“Long enough,” the man from One says curtly, and draws his arm back to throw.

“Stop!” Hawke suggests earnestly, her voice higher than she’d like, and when he shows little inclination of stopping she presses herself closer to the oak’s trunk and adds very quickly, “Those leaves are poisonous, just so you know!”

His arm checks mid-swing, and the hatchet thuds harmlessly into the thick base of the trunk instead of her very tender everything. There’s a pause as he looks at her, eyes glittering under his hair, and then he stalks over to his abandoned pile of leaves and stems and the mortar stone he’d been using to grind them into a paste. Innocuous enough on good skin, but she knows the way he’ll die, choking for breath, if he applies any of it to the gash slicing across his left calf. 

“Poisonous,” he says at last, and looks suspiciously up at her tree. He hasn’t yet moved for the axe, which she counts as a good sign.

“The number of leaves.” She makes a cautious movement towards the branch below her, and when he doesn’t go for her throat, she makes another. “You picked the one with three, not four. Baneweed. We have a lot of it in Twelve. I take it…not where you’re from.”

“The only plants in One are in gardens,” he says tersely, flicking his hair from his face, and Hawke catches another glimpse of the heavy scars that run from his bottom lip down his throat into the collar of his shirt. “I have little experience with them.”

“Well,” she says, and drops to the dirt with a thump. “I happen to have lots, if you promise not to kill me right now.”

His lip curls, but she can see the sweat beading at his temples, the pallor under his olive skin starker than she suspects he knows. “You’re a fool if you think my word counts for anything here.”

Her pulse races under her skin. The little silver tube in her belt is a reassuring weight, bottled fire, and her halberd with the lovely blade on the end is not so far out of reach against the rocks as he thinks. But if she can persuade him instead— “We don’t have to ally forever, you know. Just…for the moment. I know the rest of the Careers are trying to kill you.”

He makes a sharp motion, almost a flinch, but says nothing, and when she pulls the small leather case from her belt and tosses it at him he catches it easily. “There’s salve in there,” she says, “for infection and pain. The one with the green cap.”

It works quickly, as she’d known it would, and within a few minutes the sharp lines at the corners of his eyes have relaxed, his cheeks flush again with color, and he tosses the case back to her with no fuss. “My thanks.”

“Yes, well,” she says, and distantly, the cannon booms across the world. The trees above them tremble with the motion, a handful of birds spearing into the sky with piercing shrieks.

After a few moments, the forest settles around them again, and Hawke drags in a breath. Then she reaches behind her to yank his axe from the treetrunk, and before he can jerk forward, tosses it into the grass at his feet. He grits his teeth as he looks at her, all the muscles in his jaw jumping, and then suddenly he turns and plucks her halberd from where it leans against the rockfall that makes up the edge of their clearing. He looks up, his hands clenching around the haft, and there is such _violence_ in his eyes—

Then all at once he twists the staff in his hands, the blunt end offered her instead of the blade, and Hawke very nearly hides her relief as she wraps her fingers around the weighted wood. 

“I was bought for the Games,” he says abruptly, and his grip tenses on the staff once more before he releases it into her hands again. “By the man who gave me these scars.”

“I…didn’t know they could do that.”

“Few people do.” He shifts restlessly, his shoulders tight, his eyes scanning through the woods before returning to her. “He has connections to the Capitol. His nephew was chosen in the lottery, and I…it was decided I would replace him.”

“The recordings show you volunteering.”

He lets out a short, rough laugh at that, and slings his machete into the makeshift sheath along his hip in one motion. “A second broadcast. My sincerity was in question during the first.”

“But why?”

“He holds my sister.”

“Damn,” Hawke says, because she can’t think of anything else, and a thin, light rain begins to fall between them. “You—well, you have to survive to save her, right? I can help with that.”

“For now,” he says, his eyes still green above the scars, and when she extends her hand he doesn’t hesitate to take it. “Fenris.”

“Hawke,” she says, and grips his hand.

For now.

—

 

 **Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
 **Rating:** K  
 **Word Count:** 1300  
 **Prompt:** _Y. Tears,_ from anonymous.

—

Hawke can count on one hand the times she’s seen Fenris cry. Most of them hadn’t even been real tears, just a sheen to his eyes when he had been particularly angry or particularly lost in his own past, and she’s certainly never seen him break down with the thick, throat-catching sobs she’s fallen prey to once or twice in her life. She’s not even certain he’s still capable of it; maybe it’s only one more thing beaten out of him by the magisters, like scarless skin and easy trust and his original hair color. 

The idea of it’s about the worst thing she can imagine, which is probably why it’s become the demons’ favorite image to produce for her amusement. 

She doesn’t know how long she’s been the Fade. Time’s meaningless enough here, minutes as long as days, hours passing in the blink of an eye, no thirst to slake and no hunger but what the demons kindle in her heart. It would be easier if she could escape—could walk, even—but the fight with Nightmare has left her with two broken legs and a full cave’s worth of spiderwebs tangling her to the rock spires around her, and she’s left with little choice but to grin and bear it as best she can.

The despair demon who’s currently toying with her slips a long-fingered hand up the column of her throat, forcing her chin to lift. The image of Fenris still kneels in front of her, bleeding at all the places the lyrium used to be, and even as she watches his shoulders hitch in a sob. 

“Please,” he begs, the word breaking in the middle, and lifts his bound hands towards her.

“The voice,” she says, “is a little high, I think.”

For an instant the hand tightens around her throat, and then the image of Fenris vanishes from the ground up and she is left instead with the bare landscape of the Fade instead, the tors of stone glimmering wetly around her, the world outside her clearing disappearing into a dense gold-green fog. Nightmare has become a dessicated husk behind her, the shadows of eight curled legs spiking over her shoulders, flicking over the false Fenris’ faces just infrequently enough to alarm her before she remembers it is dead.

Well. As dead as anything gets in the Fade, anyway. 

—

The next Fenris is not crying, not yet. That bodes the worse for her—this usually means she gets to watch whatever torment’s planned for him in the making—and her mouth twists as he strides towards her out of the fog. 

“A little too broad in the shoulder,” she advises, and the despair demon’s faceless face presses cold and damp into the curve of her neck. “Now, now, don’t cry. You’ll get it next time.”

The false Fenris breaks into a run, and she shifts her shoulders lazily as three more shadows emerge from the gleaming mist behind him. One slim, holding a staff taller than she is—Merrill, she thinks—and a mustache she recognizes as Dorian, and a tall woman with a bit of green glow in one palm that she realizes must be the Inquisitor. 

“Quite an eclectic collection,” Hawke says, and watches with disinterest as Fenris yanks at the cloud of spiderwebs surrounding her. “I wonder how deep you had to dig to find these particular people?”

“Oh, _lethallan_ ,” Merrill cries, and then she lifts her staff and the world ripples with green light. It’s a very good likeness, she thinks, distantly impressed.

Fenris distracts her with a rough hand to her cheek. His gauntlets are shockingly cold, the joists catching a bit at her skin, and suddenly the demon is hissing behind her, a wet, furious thing like steam on a hot pan, and she’s never heard it make _that_ sound before—and then Merrill’s green light has mixed with Dorian’s ice and all at once its fingers have tightened around her throat and the nails are digging into her until she feels blood run hot and damp down her skin—

The Inquisitor shouts. Hawke blinks, the world abruptly beyond her comprehension, as a blade flashes down and the hand falls away from her throat. Fenris tears her from the last of the webs, white caught in her hair and dragging between her fingers, and then she’s over his shoulder and they’re moving almost too fast for her to understand. The Fade flashes into existence and out of it again with the flares of Dorian’s magic, Merrill threading something brilliant and strong through her hands, leading them somewhere, somewhere—else—

She sees a mirror, tall and narrow and just the size of a door. Merrill touches one side, the Inquisitor the other, and all at once it fills from top to bottom with a brilliant, blinding light—

—

The world is too much after all this time.

So _loud_. Every voice is thunder; every step is an echoing shock through her bones. She can’t see properly, her eyes too used to the dim dead glow of the Fade, and there are hands on her, so many hands, her legs broken, her ribs cracked, everything so sore and impossible and horrifyingly terribly _real_ and she can’t—

She _can’t_ —

Even the stones of Skyhold hum. It’s a quiet thing, just at the edge of hearing, and slowly, so slowly, Hawke realizes she is in a bedroom. In a bed, too, the fine damask curtains drawn shut and the world comfortingly dim, her legs splinted and bandaged to the thigh, a light blanket drawn to her waist. 

There are no webs in her hair. No hands on her throat. 

No whispers in her ears.

She drags in a breath, past understanding, and someone shifts. A chair, she realizes, drawn close to the bedside, and someone sitting in it. Someone stirring, now that she has stirred…

“The shoulders are a bit broad,” she says, hardly knowing what she means, and Fenris smiles. 

His fingers come to her cheek carefully, so carefully the touch hurts, and then his hand is curving fully to her jaw and he is bending close enough she can feel the heat of him, and his mouth presses very tenderly to the corner of her own. She says his name, once.

“Hawke,” he murmurs, and kisses her again.

She doesn’t understand. One hand struggles to cover his, to cut the choking panic off before it begins. “This is real,” she says, blind with fear. “This is real. This is—tell me this is—“

“This is real,” he says, quietly, and Hawke clenches her eyes shut.

“You are real.”

“I am real.”

“You came to the Fade.”

“I came for _you_ ,” Fenris says, every word fierce, and cups her jaw in both hands.

Hawke can’t breathe. His eyes are too warm, too green, and when she feels the treacherous prickle of tears she doesn’t fight them. She’s so very _tired_ of fighting. 

Fenris’s thumb slides up to her cheekbone, passes tenderly through the trail streaking down her temple. She blinks, blinks again, and in the silence Fenris’s eyes grow very bright. 

“This is real,” Hawke whispers, and touches the corner of his eye. Her finger comes away wet, and when she slides her hand tentatively into his hair he leans into her touch.

“Yes,” Fenris breathes. Alive. Alive, alive, alive…

In the distance, the stones of Skyhold are singing.


	48. Love Your OC Day (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** K+  
**Word Count:** 1100  
**Notes:** For "Love Your OC Day," and because after everything I've put the two of them through, they ought to have a little peace.

 **Soundtrack:** [Beth's Theme](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmKkaCKWreM), by Olafur Arnalds.

—

“All right,” Hawke says, doing her best to sail out of the washroom in nothing but a towel and the shreds of her dignity, “so you were right about the soapy puddles. I _know_ you said I ought to clean them up, but to tell you the truth, between the bathtub ravishing and the perils of afterglow I don’t think there’s anyone in the world who’d sit up and think ‘oh, yes, now for the mop,’ so I’m fairly certain I should be excused. _And_ for once nothing even broke when I knocked the little table over, so if you think…”

It’s not exactly prattle, but it’s absent enough that when she notices Fenris isn’t answering, she lets the sentence trail off without thought. The sound falls away into the soft murmur of Orana’s voice in the hall, Bodahn’s low, kind response, and muffled through the window-glass the distant noise of a city settling firmly into twilight. A few Hightown merchants pass through the street below, their familiar laughter bright for a moment before ebbing into farewells, and further away a pair of starlings loose a rippling trill that descends into the early evening.

And through it all, just on the very edge of her hearing: the slow, even breaths of an elf deeply and comfortably asleep.

Even worse, he’s tucked himself into the last of the daylight, deep rose and purple and a narrow blue draping over his bare shoulder as it lifts in a breath, pauses, and sinks again into shadow. He’s on his side of her bed, one arm tucked up beneath the pillow, the other half-curled at his mouth; he’s managed to dress himself in the snug knee-length linens he sleeps in and not much else. Even the sheets and covers lie pooled next to him, as if he’d fallen asleep so swiftly he hadn’t been able to finish the job of preparing properly for the night. One foot dangles over the bed’s side, long lines of lyrium lacing down over the toes, and as Hawke takes a few abrupt steps towards him, Fenris pulls in a deeper breath, stretches luxuriously so that his toes curl into a brief glimmer of dusk-light, and relaxes again without once opening his eyes.

“All right,” Hawke murmurs, her throat inexplicably tight, and she turns to the windows instead.

She’s not made for silence, but Fenris does not wake as she closes the curtains with a hiss of rings on brass, as she lights the barest crackling embers of the hearthfire into life again. She finds the oversized nightshirt with the rumpled sleeves and the tear along one shoulder where the dog once overwhelmed her with affection, manages to close the drawer again without the slide creaking even once, and then she stands by the bed as she towels her hair dry as best she can.

“You must have been so tired,” she eventually murmurs, when she’s dry as she can get herself without setting herself afire, and drapes the towel over the carved screen in the corner of the room. “You should have said something. Not that a week camping on the lee side of a cursed mountain is going to make for restful sleep for anyone, but you didn’t have to come to cards with me tonight.” She pauses for a moment before bending the rest of the way, gathering her discarded, sweat-stained clothes from their leaf-scattered places across her floor. “I didn’t have to go either, I suppose. But I was glad I did. I was glad _you_ did. It’s never the same without everyone there.”

There’s a soft thump as she deposits the clothes in the hamper, then turns to the armor Fenris has shed, scale-like, in a haphazard trail at the foot of her bed. “Look at this. I’m giving you so many terrible habits.” Granted, he’d been preoccupied at the time with her own leathers, but still. Principles and so forth, and the most careful man she’s ever known.

It’s an odd thing, putting away Fenris’s armor for him. Odder still to do so with him sleeping not ten feet from her, so tired from a week of late-hour watches and irregular, violent battles that he does not once stir at the clink of steel on steel or the shirring of a leather strap. Not even a catch to his breath when she says his name, or the twitch of a single lash when she puts away his things in the drawers he has claimed as his own, or when she comes and perches on the bed beside him and begins to braid her hair for the night. In all the years she’s known him, she can count on one hand the times she’s seen him so defenseless.

 _Safe_ , a soft voice points out, but she resolutely finishes the braid with a fine strip of leather and does not think of it again. She learned long ago she’s the farthest thing for him from safe, and if she’d move heaven and earth to keep him from waking, here, it’s nothing more than anyone might do for a lover who hasn’t slept well in seven days.

His face is so _calm_. Not a single line of tension at the corners of his eyes, or across his forehead, or at the corners of his full mouth. Just the slow rise of his chest with every inhale, the gleam of twilight on lyrium, and so much affection her heart runs nigh to cracking.

“I love you,” Hawke says suddenly. The words float into the evening air, hanging like a low star, and before she can stop herself she leans over and runs her fingers gently through his hair. Enough blue light still seeps around the edges of the drawn curtains to kindle the fine, pale strands as they fall over her fingers, to show the barest glint of green as his eyes crack open at her touch.

He does not wake, not really. Just enough that he sees her, and that she sees a faint, tired lift to the corner of his mouth, and then he closes his eyes again and the slow, deep, even breaths of sleep return. She draws through his hair a few minutes more, just as slow and just as steady, until the last of the evening light fades to a dim purple, and then to grey, and then she pulls the covers over his bare chest and kisses the curve of his shoulder twice, just to let it know how much she adores it.

She closes her eyes eventually, but she lies awake a long time, listening to the sigh of a breeze against her window, the hush of the cusp of night, and the faint, low song of distant starlings.


	49. AU Meme: Mer (Hawke/Fenris)

**Characters/Pairing:** Hawke/Fenris  
**Rating:** K+  
**Word Count:** 3300  
**Notes:** for no reason other than it’s been niggling at me lately, and i’m hoping this will be enough to get it out of my head for a while. planning on leaving this as a oneshot right now, though i have enough of this world fleshed out i may come back and poke at it again in future. who knows!

—

“This story begins, as all good stories do, with a stone.”

“Mm.”

“And not just any stone. Though its black and grimy exterior may point to a rock of woefully common origin, the wisest and most _true_ of spirit may discern that beneath the dirt lies the rarest, most magical artifact of this age: a witch’s heart.”

“Bad luck for you, then.”

“I haven’t the faintest clue what you’re implying.”

Bethany laughs, and Hawke stirs herself just enough to kick a small spray of water towards her sister’s face. There’s a sputter and another laugh, and then a much larger wave splashes over the rock Hawke’s sunning on. Including, as it happens, most of Hawke.

“Rude,” she says to the brilliant blue sky, and pushes her soaking hair from her eyes. The stone still glimmers in her hand, a thumb-sized wedge of translucent black and red and oddly bright gold, and she lifts it straight up, stretching out her arm until the stone is directly between her and the sun. There’s a moment of odd, filtered light as she closes her other eye and studies it, red and gold filling the entirety of her vision and turning the world to something strange and savage; then a fish surfaces nearby with a splash and the spell is broken. 

Hawke blows out a breath, watching the stone transform in a moment to ordinary glass once more, and pushes up to a seated position. She tosses the stone to herself, glancing towards the ocean’s glittering horizon, and when it fails to reveal its secrets, she slides off the boulder into the waist-deep shallows surrounding her.

Bethany doesn’t even open her eyes from her own boulder, one leg still dangling shin-deep in the low-rolling waves. “Are you going in already?”

“No. I’m going to take this to the grotto.”

“Again? One day you’ll find the tide’s come and taken every silly pebble you’ve hoarded back to the ocean, where they belong.”

“And it’ll be you I come crying to, dearest.”

Bethany snorts, though Hawke can see the glimmer of her smile. “You’ll have to look elsewhere. I don’t mend broken hearts.”

“Liar,” Hawke says, and shakes her hair behind her stinging shoulders. She’s burnt already, even so early in the summer, and she heaves a sigh as she tucks her sleeveless linen shirt into the snug knee-length trousers her mother had made months ago for the cooler water. Not quite so needed now, not with spring nearly gone, but this beach is not far enough from the village to guarantee privacy when swimming in their smalls, and if nothing else, they fit well enough to keep her gliding through the water without resistance.

She dips momentarily beneath the next gentle wave and emerges again, tasting salt. “I’ll be back before dinner.”

Bethany reaches down with a lazy hand as Hawke wades past her rock and tugs at a loose lock of hair. “Watch out for witches.”

“Always,” Hawke says, grinning, and dives forward into the waves.

―

The grotto had been an accidental discovery the first month her family had moved to this isolated, remote fishing village. She’s never had the nature to brood; all the same, she hadn’t particularly wished to leave Lothering, even with the plague that had decimated the village and the raiders that had burned the rest to the ground. Relocating somewhere so isolated the townsfolk had not heard of the Hawke witchcraft had been hard enough; finding themselves _here_ , in this place that smelled of fish and cared nothing for the wider world beyond, had been…

Well. Not exactly what she’d hoped.

Still, exploration of the rocky beaches along their seaside home had led her to this secret grotto tucked into the shelter of a small bay. The cliffs rise around it to a height of thirty or forty feet, moss-choked rock overhanging the bay just enough to keep the whole thing from prying eyes, and the grotto’s rounded entrance is tall enough to remain well open even at high tide.

As poor she is at secret-keeping, it’s the best she’s ever had.

Hawke swims inside without hesitating, the water ten or twelve feet deep all the way into the grotto itself. The sound changes immediately as she enters, the lap of the water echoing close and endless against the roof of the moderately sized cave. Ripples of reflected light play along the ceiling and the smooth stone walls, broken only where moss has fought its way over a ledge or along one of the rough outcroppings lining the cavern. The water doesn’t reach all the way to the walls of the grotto; there’s enough room along both sides to walk if she sidles, but the far edge of the pool shallows out before hitting the broader back floor, the lowest place there still about a foot above the tideline.

Hawke tosses the stone onto the back ledge, then curls both hands around the edge before dropping below the surface of the water. More than enough slope to the wall, here; she pulls her knees to her chest and flattens her bare feet against the stone, then leverages herself up and over the ledge onto flat rock. The rushing water echoes for a handful of seconds as she rolls to her back and stands, then bends to pluck her pilfered stone from the ground.

“Hello, beautiful,” she says, and the cave echoes back _hello beautiful hello hello_.

“Well,” she adds to the grotto in general, “thank you very much,” and strolls to the back of the cave where her box is. It’s a good size for what she needs, about two feet wide and fashioned with sturdy iron bands, and both latches click as she flips them open. Her soaked hair drips into the pile of stones and shells and bits of broken glass inside; she flips the knotted tail over her shoulder impatiently, and at last, after dislodging the green glass bottle with the coded letter inside, she finds the sea-worn wooden trinket box she’d fished out of the waves months ago.

The lid had been a puzzle in and of itself, but she knows it so well by now she can work it in her sleep. Inside are two more pieces of translucent stone, also black and streaked with red and gold, and with a bit of fiddling she arranges them so that her third piece fits into the last, missing place. A pretty thing all put together: a round, polished disc the size of her palm, and she allows herself a delighted smile as she turns with the box back to the pool.

With a bit of maneuvering, she manages to get herself seated on the edge of the pool without dropping either the box or herself into the water, and once she’s settled, presses the pieces a little more firmly into place. They fit together well, no missing chunks or fragments, and if she presses hard enough the veins where it was broken nearly disappear. Not completely, though, no matter how hard she pushes, and just as she’s wondering if it’s worth it to beg a jar of paste from her mother’s next market trip there’s a bright flash of light through every gold vein in the disc.

Hawke goes very still. Ten seconds pass, thirty, and―nothing. Perhaps she’s been too long in the sun after all―but the instant the thought crosses her mind, there’s another flicker of light in her hands.

This time she realizes it’s more than the disc. It’s the cavern itself, the water’s reflectance changing with some disturbance at the grotto’s mouth, throwing broad strokes of light over the ceiling and across the disc in its stained wood box. The water’s surface is― _rippling_ , somehow, and moving with the motion of something beneath it, something long and sinuous and _alive_ ―

And swimming directly into her grotto.

It doesn’t even occur to her to take her feet from the water. There’s something wild here, something dangerous and terribly compelling, and she can’t―move―

The rippling disturbance in the water arrows directly towards the back ledge, to a point not ten feet from where she sits, and when it reaches the stone lip the creature bursts from the water in a spray of surface froth.

White hair.

White hair, long and hanging loose over the shoulders, and deep olive-brown skin, and ears pulled to a tapering point. A bare back, lean with muscle, and one tense, very human arm hooked over the ledge for purchase. And from about the middle of its back, extending down to wrap around both hips and indeed everything else she can see above the rippling water, are what appear to be, most definitely, scales.

There’s a deep, pained grunt as that arm slips and struggles again for grip, and when the creature shifts she catches a glimpse of a large metal barb embedded deep in the back of its left shoulder. And then, slowly, like a tree’s shadow growing longer with dusk, a long, black, scaled tail with two elegant fins on either side slips to the surface of the water. It slaps once, a thing of fear and frustration that sends spray several feet into the air, then curls tightly to the left before sinking a few inches into the clear green pool.

There’s a mer in her grotto.

“Flames,” says Hawke, slightly giddy, and the creature’s head whips in her direction fast enough to send drops flying from the ends of its hair. “Did you know you’re real?”

―

He does not, as it turns out, kill her immediately.

And it’s most certainly a he, as during the remarkably vicious hiss he gives her in answer he also turns to face her full-on, displaying the bare chest and stomach of a human man. It’s heavily marked in a white, thin-lined pattern that extends in dots and curved, twisting barbs down the length of what tail she can see, although she can’t tell if it’s a natural pattern or something he’s added as decoration. And―he _has a tail_. And black, glittering scales that appear to grow directly out of his skin, beginning a handspan south of his navel and covering every part of that long tail save the twin fins near his―well, hips, she supposes, and the broader, translucent fins that mark the end of his tail. And startlingly green eyes beneath heavy black brows, human for all the savagery in him.

And a very, _very_ angry look on his face.

She should probably deal with that.

“So,” she starts, abruptly aware she’s clutching the wooden box so tightly her fingers ache. “Welcome to my…cave.”

His eyes narrow. Nothing else.

She pauses, then tries again. “Right. Well. I’m sorry if I’m staring; it’s just that I haven’t met many gentlemen who are half-fish.”

He pulls a few feet away, the water’s reflection on the ceiling rippling with the movement, and grimaces at the pain. His canine teeth are extraordinarily long.

“Well, I’m not sure what you expected. Jerk around with something like that…” she gestures lamely at her own shoulder, “hook-thing in there, of course it’s going to hurt.”

Now he snarls, his lip curling, and Hawke hurriedly sets the box behind her, just in case. Still, he’s not…eating her, or anything. That’s probably a good sign.

“So,” she tries again, drawing out the word. “Are you understanding anything I’m saying? Or do you have one of those―those tongue-click languages, or some speech that’s only intelligible underwater?” She clicks her tongue twice to demonstrate, just in case she happens to stumble over the combination for a polite and deferent greeting, but if anything, he looks more irritated than before. “Look, serah, I’m trying to meet you halfway. I apologize for not knowing how to properly address a fictional creature from my mother’s storybook. Satisfied?”

His jaw clenches, his eyes flicking from her to the grotto’s entrance and back again.

“Oh, for the _Maker’s_ ―” Hawke lets out an explosive sigh as she shoves to her feet, stalking wetly across the ledge to the back wall where she keeps the rest of her supplies. There’s not much here in the way of medical equipment, but she has more than enough tools to remove an errant hook, and she moves back to the stone edge with her bag and a sound of no small annoyance. “Look. Do you want those barbs out of you or not?”

He doesn’t answer, naturally, and Hawke yanks open the bag. Clippers, which she’d originally brought to break the locks on the little wood chest; bandages, which Bethany had insisted she take after the first time she’d come home with her palms skinned to the Void after a fall from a bluff; and a thick elfroot paste, meant to staunch bleeding and hurry healing. “Considering you’re roaming around with sharks, anyway,” she says into the cave, and the ceiling throws back _sharks sharks sharks_.

Tools arrayed beside her on the ledge, Hawke gives an exaggerated gesture of impatience. “ _Well_? As riveting as this standoff is, you’re bleeding all over my rocks.”

His lips curl again, baring enough teeth her heart skips a beat or two, and then, slowly, he leans forward with predatory grace, that long tail uncoiling behind him, and the water sluices around either side of his chest in a narrow V as he begins to swim directly towards her.

She swallows, just in case she needs to scream later, and― _Maker_ , his eyes are green. Greener than the grotto, and coming closer, and his good hand comes to brace on the stone not six inches from her knee. Hawke closes her eyes and takes a breath, then says, steady as an anchor and not at all like a quivering jellyfish, “You’ll have to turn around for this.”

He makes―well, it’s a hiss, really, as much threat as answer, all his teeth showing, and then he turns just enough that she can see the barb dug into the back of his left shoulder. He keeps his face to her as best he can, unblinking eyes fixed on hers over his shoulder, and every now and then she can swear she sees them shimmer with an odd light.

As stares go, it’s pointedly unnerving.

Still, the doubt is simple enough to put out of her mind once she’s got a good look at the hook. It’s easily the size of her fist and made of polished steel, four razor-tipped barbs curving outward from the base like the petals of a dangerous bloom. One of them has embedded itself deep in the mer’s flesh just inside his shoulder blade, a full inch of the hooked tip protruding from his skin to keep it from sliding free again. The flesh itself is worried and ragged where the hook pierces, as if he has tried to yank the thing out by force more than once, and dark red blood seeps sluggishly from both broken places in his skin to be washed away by the grotto’s pool.

“A right pickle and no mistake,” Hawke offers, already picking up the clippers. She keeps her tone conversational as she pinches the barbed tip and pulls it a little further from his skin, ignoring the whip his tail gives under the water at the pain. “Hold tight, my piscatorial friend. This might sting.”

His lip curls again, but he doesn’t flinch when she brings the clippers to the base of the flared hook. It takes two tries, which is mildly embarrassing, but on the second burst of effort the barb snaps off, sailing through the air in a brief, glinting arc before disappearing with a small splash into the water.  

“Halfway there,” she says into the echo, and his tail thrashes again. “Now, now, none of that. I swear, you’re worse than my little brother.” The tip of his tail breaches the surface once, less violently than before, then goes still. Encouraged, Hawke continues the running monologue as she begins to work the now un-barbed pole of the hook backwards through the wound. “I mean, really. You’d think someone had cut your arm off instead of gotten one little hook stuck in you. Of course, the tragedy of this whole situation is that I’ll never be able to tell him I met a worse patient than he is―the moment the tail comes in the whole story goes out the window, and instead of getting to hold it over his head they’ll confine me to my room for a week while they inspect my head for injury. _Aha!_ ”

The shaft comes free at last. The man gives a terrible shudder as it pulls out, then makes a sharp movement as if he means to duck under the surface and vanish; Hawke clamps her hand around his good shoulder first before her survival instincts can take over, and dangles the hook by its broken line in front of them both. “Wait! Hold onto this for a moment, will you? Not just because you need a souvenir, but this really has begun to bleed, and somehow I feel like it might be in your best interest to not go splashing your trail about for whatever’s chasing you to find.”

He tosses his head in agitation but doesn’t pull away, and after another moment he reaches up with his previously limp arm and accepts the hook. Strong fingers, short-trimmed nails―she’s not sure why that surprises her so much―and rough skin on the heels of his hands, as if he’s used to working with them. Not that she should be thinking about this right now anyway, and she gives herself a few good mental slaps as she wipes the blood clean with the gauze and begins to coat both wounds in the elfroot paste. It’s quick enough work now that the thing’s out, and soon the blood begins to slow, then stop altogether.

“There we go,” she says, giving his shoulder two quick pats. “Now, just don’t get that wet for another fifteen minutes, and you’ll be right as rain.”

There’s a long pause. Then the mer swivels in the water, the hook disappearing beneath the surface without so much as a ripple, and he gives her the most withering look she’s gotten in years.

“Setting all sorts of records today,” Hawke mutters, and folds the jar of elfroot back into her sack with the clippers and unused gauze before rising to her feet and heading towards the back of the cave. “Now, friend,” she says over her shoulder, “I’m sorry you’re stuck here, but look on the bright side: I’m not trying to kill _you_ , you’re not trying to kill _me_ , and you’re no longer stuck on that hook like a bit of very handsome fishy bait. How is this not an improvement?”

The withering look vanishes, and in its place settles something between embarrassment and surprise and vague discomfort. He looks to the side, his hand coming up briefly to pass over his jaw―also very, very attractive, if she’s honest with herself―and all at once the meaning of the gesture crashes down like a load of bricks.

Hawke knots the sack shut, sets it very deliberately on the ledge where it belongs, and turns to face him square-on before crossing her arms. “You can understand everything I’m saying.”

He gives a small, awkward cough.

“Not just the gist. Every word.”

He inclines his head. How odd, that _apologetic_ should look the same in every language.

“Well, then.” She walks back to the ledge, kneels gingerly on the stone, and sticks out her hand above the water. “I’m Hawke. Nice to meet you.”

For one hideously humiliating moment, she thinks he’ll ignore her altogether. Then the head comes forward and the tail ripples beneath the water, and the mer crosses what little distance remains between them to lift his arm from the pool. Water sluices from it in a clear sheet, and then his fingers wrap around hers, cool and just as strong as she’d imagined.

“My name is Fenris,” he says, low and deep and delicious, and the cave echoes it back, the sound wrapping slowly around them both among the endless gleaming reflections of the pool.

―


End file.
